The Antidote to Willfulness: Manufacturing Dissent, Kony 2012, and Propaganda As a Technology of Governance

THE ANTIDOTE TO WILLFULNESS: MANUFACTURING DISSENT, KONY 2012, AND PROPAGANDA AS A TECHNOLOGY OF GOVERNANCE

JOHN WESLEY JONES JR.

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Policy Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018

Urbana, Illinois

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Cameron McCarthy, Chair Professor William Cope Associate Research Professor Anita Chan Associate Professor Pradeep Dhillon

ABSTRACT

This dissertation presents a new definition of propaganda using the massively viral internet video KONY 2012 as an example. KONY 2012 was produced by the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Invisible Children, which was founded by three young Americans in order to inform the American public about the crimes of the

Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. Within a few days of its release on the internet, KONY

2012 had become the most viral video of all time up to that point, garnering almost 100 million views on the popular video sharing website YouTube. Contrary to the concept of propaganda as simplistic lies, this dissertation argues that KONY 2012 demonstrates that propaganda is a sophisticated technique for governing and managing the behavior of individuals towards political ends in a literate, information-saturated, liberal democratic society.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE: ...... 1

INTRODUCTION: PROPAGANDA: THE ANTIDOTE TO WILLFULNESS ...... 14

CHAPTER 1: THE HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA ...... 48

CHAPTER 2: DEWEY AND LIPPMANN: PROPAGANDA AS A TECHNOLOGY OF

GOVERNANCE AND THE PLACE OF EDUCATION ...... 76

CHAPTER 3: ANALYZING KONY 2012: AUGMENTING STUART HALL’S EN/DE-

CODING MODEL WITH A MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL AND LOTMAN’S

SEMIOSPHERE ...... 99

CHAPTER 4: THE MILITARY-ENTERTAINMENT-COMPLEX AND KONY 2012 AS

MILITAINMENT RECRUITMENT STRATEGY FOR VIRTUOUS WAR ...... 130

CHAPTER 5: THE INTEGRATED SPECTACLE: MANUFACTURING DISSENT WITH

NETWORKS AND PROPAGANDA ...... 161

CONCLUSION: PROPAGANDA IN A POST-SOCIAL MEDIA AGE ...... 199

REFERENCES ...... 206

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PREFACE

Propaganda is a concession to the wilfulness [sic] of the age…The new antidote

to wilfulness [sic] is propaganda. If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must

accept its chains of silver. If it will not love, honour [sic] and obey, it must not

expect to escape seduction. Propaganda is a reflex to the immensity, the

rationality and wilfulness [sic] of the modern world. It is the new dynamic of

society, for power is subdivided and diffused, and more can be won by illusion

than by coercion. It has all the prestige of the new and provokes all the animosity

of the baffled. To illuminate the mechanisms of propaganda is to reveal the

secret springs of social action, and to expose to the most searching criticism our

prevailing dogmas of sovereignty, of democracy, of honesty, and of the sanctity

of individual opinion. The study of propaganda will bring into the open much that

is obscure, until, indeed, it may no longer be possible for an Anatole France to

observe with truth that "Democracy (and, indeed, all society) is run by an unseen

engineer" (Lasswell,1938, p. 222) [emphasis added]

Lasswell’s “antidote”, propaganda, is most necessary in the societies that allow the greatest degree of political freedom. It is a cure for a condition that has afflicted modern, post-Enlightenment, liberal democracies since they began appearing more than 200 years ago. This condition results from a tension between the stated ideals upon which democratic republics are founded, such as popular sovereignty and the fitness of all citizens to participate in the democratic process as possessors of reason, 1

and the necessity of stable governance of society. Engels (2011) explains that,

“contrary to the misperception cultivated by politicians and pundits today, the United

States was not born a democracy; quite the opposite, for democracy was portrayed as

an enemy to political virtue and national stability in the years following the American

Revolution. In the 1780s, democracy was compared to a volcano, a plague, a cancer, a

storm, and a wild fire” (p. 131). This fear of democracy, called “demophobia” by Robert

L. Ivie (2005), “imagines the demos as an undisciplined mass, a murderous horde that

is not only deaf to right speech but exudes its own toxic speech that spreads demotic

violence” (Engels, 2011, p. 134). Such was the fear of the democratic horde that

founding father Elbridge Gerry posited at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that:

“The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy” (Engels, 2011, p. 131).

During the founding period democracy was associated not with popular suffrage, nor a

tripartite federal government with a system of checks and balances, but with mob rule

and armed conflict like Shays’ Rebellion. The rhetoric of demophobia, exemplified by

the Federalist Papers and Alexander Hamilton, birthed a counter-narrative, demophilia, most famously championed by Thomas Jefferson. While demophilia, the love of the people, rejected the fear of democracy prevalent during the founding period, Engels

(2011) points out that even this counter-narrative was concerned with the correct governance of the democratic impulse: “Like demophobia, demophilia is ultimately a discourse that can be used to tame democracy—for it shapes how democracy is lived, altering what is sayable and thinkable, who can speak and in what ways” (p. 134).

The uneasiness caused by the possibility of democracy has remained until the contemporary period. In the 70s it was forcefully expressed in a landmark report

authored by three researchers from the Trilateral Commission. The Report, The Crisis

of Democracy (1975), written in the wake of the politically tumultuous 1960s expressed

many of the same reservations about democracy that were prevalent during the

founding period of the nation, arguing that, “some of the problems of governance in the

United States today stem from an excess of democracy” (p.113). The authors argue that

the social upheaval of the 1960s had led to contradictory claims on the government,

weakening its authority and leading to a “crisis of democracy”. On one hand, diverse

groups began to criticize the actions of the government, while on the other, many of

these same groups made increasing claims on the government to rectify social ills such

as racism and wealth inequality. Such claims present an unresolvable dilemma that led

to pessimism about the future of the viability of democracy, according to the authors.

The authors identified two challenges internal to the Western democracies that

posed a threat for the future of democracy; “adversary intellectuals” and “related

groups” and a parallel degradation of social values, and intrinsic contradictions within

the system of democracy itself. Of the first challenge, the report says: “The development

of an "adversary culture" among intellectuals has affected students, scholars, and the

media… In some measure, the advanced industrial societies have spawned a stratum

of value-oriented intellectuals who often devote themselves to the derogation of

leadership, the challenging of authority, and the unmasking and delegitimation of

established institutions, their behavior contrasting with that of the also increasing

numbers of technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals. In an age of widespread secondary school and university education, the pervasiveness of the mass media, and the displacement of manual labor by clerical and professional employees, this

development constitutes a challenge to democratic government which is, potentially at least, as serious as those posed in the past by the aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and communist parties (Crozier, Huntington, & Watanuki, 1975, pp. 6-7).

The authors also noted a concomitant change in the values of the non-intellectual public: “a shift in values is taking place away from the materialistic work-oriented, public- spirited values toward those which stress private satisfaction, leisure, and the need for belonging and intellectual and esthetic self-fulfillment… [These values} often coexist with greater skepticism towards political leaders and institutions and with greater alienation from the political processes. They tend to be privatistic in their impact and import (Crozier, Huntington, & Watanuki, 1975, p. 7).

The above developments are both challenges that arise from within a democratic society, and indeed, such developments are perhaps bred and encouraged by the freedom of political expression given to individuals in such societies, and the relatively high degree of affluence that obtains in the “trilateral nations” (the US, Western Europe, and Japan). The authors of the report make this very argument, saying that: “there are the intrinsic challenges to the viability of democratic government which grow directly out of the functioning of democracy. Democratic government does not necessarily function in a self-sustaining or self-correcting equilibrium fashion. It may instead function so as to give rise to forces and tendencies which, if unchecked by some outside agency, will eventually lead to the undermining of democracy...The more democratic a system is, indeed, the more likely it is to be endangered by intrinsic threats (Crozier, Huntington, &

Watanuki, 1975, p. 8).

Like the demophobes of the founding period of the United States, it is obvious

that the authors of the Trilateral Commission report think that the “crisis of democracy”

is really democracy itself. Whereas the demophobic founders identified democracy with

mob rule and armed insurrection, the authors of the report feared the increasing

critiques of government and capital coming from the demos in the wake of the civil

rights struggles of the 1960s and the public outrage over the Vietnam War.

The argument of this essay1 is that propaganda, properly understood, provides

Lasswell’s “antidote to willfulness”, in other words, a type of technology for the

successful governance of a society, particularly those of the liberal democratic type. In

post-industrial, affluent, liberal democracies with high rates of literacy and education,

propaganda is more useful that cruder forms of social control. Direct use of force would

be counter-productive since, if those who govern a society possessed legitimate

authority, they would not need to use force. Likewise, crude lies and misinformation

would be of limited use since an educated, literate, population would eventually find

contradictory evidence exposing the lie. Both of these methods would illicit massive

resistance. Rather than follow either of the aforementioned paths, propaganda effects

the governance of a democratic society by avoiding truth claims and, when not making

appeals to emotion, skillfully using statistical and quantifiable data to persuade. The

social changes described by Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki (1975) in The Crisis of

Democracy make this technique necessary. The populations of the wealthy liberal

democracies, especially the young, now seek not only material well-being, but also intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment, and in many ways oppositional politics, which came

1 I use the term “essay” in the older sense of “to attempt” or “to try” (From the Middle French essayer, cognate with “assay”) to signify that the present work is an attempt to work out my ideas in writing. 5

as a shock in the 1960s, has become valorized in the popular culture. Propaganda

today works not by opposing this societal shift, but by harnessing it; it uses the desire

for a meaningful, stimulating life, and the commodification and banalization of radical

politics to direct popular energies in ways that maintain the stability of the status quo

and achieve the political goals of society’s governors.

The necessity of propaganda as a technology of governance, and its efficacy, are

both demonstrated by the relative social stability of the liberal democracies, especially

the United States, despite the degradation of effective democratic control of the

government and increasing levels of such destabilizing factors as wealth inequality,

unemployment, and poverty. In a report published for The United Nations University

World Institute for Development Economics Research, Davies, Sandström, Shorrocks,

and Wolff (2008) investigated income and wealth inequality globally and at the national

level. The authors report that the Gini coefficient (a measure of wealth inequality within

a society) of the United States is 0.801, near the top of the list for the countries listed

(the global Gini coefficient was 0.892). The Gini scale runs from 0 to 1, and higher

values signify greater wealth inequality. For comparison, the same study reported the

Gini coefficient for Japan at 0.547, and for China at 0.550.

In the realm of legislation and policy, in the United States, democracy has all but disappeared for the average citizen. In a study which used a multivariate analysis to

gauge the effect of economic elites and interest groups on U.S. government policy,

Gilens and Page (2014) found that: “The central point that emerges from our research is

that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have

substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest

groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence” (p. 565). In contrast to majoritarian pluralist theories of American democracy that posit that “all interests have at least a minimum of influence in group-dominated policy making” and that the

“wants or needs of the average citizen tend to be reasonably well served by the outcomes of interest-group struggle,” Gilens and Page argue that: “When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy” (pp. 566-

567, 575).

When the alarming findings of Davies, Sandström, Shorrocks, and Wolff (2008) and Gilens and Page (2014), among others, are considered, one would be hard pressed to reach any other conclusion than that, at least in the United States, contrary to the argument of the authors of the Trilateral Commission’s Crisis of Democracy, the real crisis of democracy is not an excess of democracy, but a near total lack of democracy.

One must also ask how the United States can maintain such a relatively stable, peaceful society in the face of such inequality and lack of political power for the majorit of citizens. Of course, there is no single reason for this. Surely, one reason is that, although wealth and income are highly unequally distributed, the general level of wealth is quite high and the needs of most of the population are met, and even their political desires are sometimes achieved, if only because, as Gilens and Page (2014) explain, some of the political desires of the average citizen are shared by the elites who truly affect policy. However, there are other reasons, and the one offered here is that

Lasswell’s antidote, propaganda, is effective in controlling the willfulness of the public.

Gilens and Page (2014) discuss this very explanation. They identify three “faces

of power”: the first “face” refers to “the ability of actors to shape policy outcomes on

contested issues”; the second “face” refers to “the ability to shape the agenda of issues

that policy makers consider”, in other words, the spectrum of that are able to make it to

the stage of even being desired or opposed by the public; and, the third “face” of power

refers to “the ability of elites to shape the public’s preferences” (p. 576). The argument

presented here is that propaganda works to affect all three of these “faces”, but, as a

technology of governance, it particularly affects the second and third “faces” of power.

In a highly unequal, but affluent and well-educated society like the United States, the governors of society maintain the status quo more effectively by influencing desires, preferences, opinions, and standpoints in general, and by controlling what issues and

ideas achieve visibility for public consideration.

The forms that propaganda takes are varied and range from influencing

the reporting of the news and the framing of discussions on important political issues as

outlined by Chomsky and Herman (2002), to influencing and creating the content for

entertainment products such as cinematic films and video games. In the United States,

the military and the national security apparatus are deeply involved in creating

propaganda in the form of entertainment media for the purpose of inculcating a positive

opinion of the U.S. military and the “intelligence community” and projecting an image of

strength and competency at home and abroad. In an editorial for a special issue of the

American Journal of Economics and Sociology dealing specifically with the relationship

between the Department of Defense, the CIA, and Hollywood, Cobb (2017), describing

this relationship, says, “Government involvement in the entertainment business only

makes sense as part of a broader effort to limit dissent in the United States by managing the information available to citizens,” adding that, “The obvious reason the national security establishment has become imbedded in the production of entertainment products is to persuade the public to view the world in a way that is compatible with the ideology of DoD and the CIA” (pp. 243, 263). The relationship between Hollywood and the military and security apparatus takes the form of the latter providing access to material such as weapons or aircraft and physical sites in exchange for the ability to review and edit scripts for films. Access to actual material and locations is important to Hollywood because it helps film producers create the illusion of realism that contemporary audiences demand. Without the access provided by the Department of Defense and the CIA, recreating such material would cost millions, increasing productions costs and eating into profits. In this arrangement both sides benefit;

Hollywood gets to make ultra-realistic blockbusters more cheaply, and the military and security apparatus gain the ability to shape the way they are perceived. Films are especially effective for propagandistic purposes, since “movies can overcome doubts and reservations that arguments cannot touch. Movies are thus a powerful form of propaganda. The public watches them because they are entertaining, but while we are being entertained, we are also being conditioned to see the world in a way that aligns with the views of the U.S. national security establishment” (Cobb, 2017, pp. 238-239).

Propaganda efforts extend past entertainment. A key target of propaganda efforts in the United States has been intellectuals. Cobb (2017) mentions the possible involvement of the CIA in influencing the attitudes of conservative intellectuals toward the agency. In the early days of the agency conservatives were suspicious of its agenda

due to its excessive involvement in the politics of foreign nations. However, by

supporting William F. Buckley’s magazine, National Review, during its struggling early

years, the CIA helped to create a brand of conservativism that was expansionist and

interventionist. The CIA’s efforts to influence both the conservative and liberal sides of the spectrum in the US is explored in much greater detail by Saunders (2013) who reveals how the agency sponsored organizations such as the Congress of Cultural

Freedom in a bid to combat the growth of communism by supporting the efforts of artists, writers, and intellectuals of the non-communist left (NCL).

The main argument of the dissertation is that the pejorative connotation that the

term “propaganda” now evokes, and that the equation of propaganda with lies, are both

incorrect and unhelpful in understanding what the propaganda is and how it works.

Instead, the dissertation will argue that propaganda is an activity more akin to what is

normally considered education. This will be done by examining the viral internet video

KONY 2012 as an example of a new type of propaganda. Several researchers have

analyzed this video from varying standpoints including critical cultural studies, group

psychological, and anthropological frameworks. The analysis of the KONY 2012 show

that, far from being merely lies meant to deceive, propaganda can more adequately be

explained as a type of technology of governance, or, a tool for carrying out the “conduct

of conduct” (Wimberly, 2017).

There are many types of activity which can be described as “educational” and

what is meant by education here is not the narrow type of education that exists to

transmit technical or manual skills (vocational or “social efficiency” education), but rather

the kind of education that cultivates opinions and a certain orientation toward society

and the world. This broader sense of the word education is closer to how the pragmatist

philosopher John Dewey conceived of education. Indeed, this connection was noted by

the French philosopher Jacques Ellul in his study of propaganda: “Stalinist propaganda

was in great measure founded on Pavlov’s theory of the conditioned reflex. Hitlerian

propaganda was in great measure founded on Freud’s theory of repression and libido.

American propaganda is founded in great measure on Dewey’s theory of teaching”

(Ellul, 1968, p. 5).

Obviously, Ellul does not mean that Dewey’s educational philosophy is

essentially propaganda, or that his philosophy is sinister and therefore more conducive

to being repurposed for propaganda techniques and is furthermore an ineffective or

“bad” philosophy by virtue of this association. In fact, there is much evidence to show

that Ellul had much respect for the educational philosophy of Dewey and other

“progressive” educators. More likely the case is that Dewey’s educational philosophy

was, if Ellul is to be believed, used as a template by American marketers and

propagandists precisely because of its effectiveness at achieving its aim, namely, to

prepare students to live in a particularly type of society or way-of-living; a democracy, in

Dewey’s case.

The insight from Ellul that the dissertation will take advantage of is that a holistic educational philosophy such as Dewey’s may also be useful in preparing the mind for life in a type of society very different from that which Dewey thought ideal, if the merely the form of that educational method is utilized and not its spirit. Therefore, returning to the point of how propaganda will be defined in the dissertation, I characterize propaganda as: a mass-educational enterprise that cultivates a certain orientation to the

world within its targets (the audience). I do not argue that all education is propaganda, but rather that all propaganda is a type of educational enterprise or undertaking that, like moral or ethical education, seeks to cultivate a new type of human subject with new opinions and desires.

Following from this it must be said what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that everything is propaganda. Such a facile and loose definition would make any further examination of propaganda quite pointless. However, the definition of propaganda cannot be so simple in the opposite way either, that there is a simple and clear delineation between propaganda and “true” information. It is not true that propaganda is always and only lies and falsehoods meant to deceive, or that it is an activity carried out only by repressive totalitarian regimes. We must realize that there exists are range of different types of propaganda, from the crude anti-German posters and fliers of World

War I, to Hitler’s campaigns against “decadent” art and music, to the subtle influence exerted on Hollywood productions by the US Department of Defense’s film liaison’s office.

The range of types propaganda is paralleled by the description of persuasive rhetoric given by the literary theorist Kenneth Burke: “All told, persuasion ranges from the bluntest quest for advantage, as in sales promotion or propaganda, through courtship, social etiquette, education, and the sermon, to a ‘pure’ form that delights in the process of appeal for itself alone, without ulterior purpose” (Burke, 1950: xiv).

Now, if we cannot say that “everything is propaganda”, and if we accept that there exists a range of propaganda that includes crude forms and the subtle and sophisticated, we must answer the question of the particularity of propaganda. To the

definition of propaganda as an educative enterprise as stated above, the dissertation will take the position that propaganda is a persuasive (rhetorical), educational enterprise which can be produced by an individual or by a group, and which is targeted towards a group and not just a single individual. Propaganda must be created with some specific agenda in mind, to affect some concrete result, and its target must be a mass of individuals in some sort of target population.

INTRODUCTION: PROPAGANDA: THE ANTIDOTE TO WILLFULNESS

Research investigating the educational uses of technology outside of the traditional categories of LMSs (learning management systems) and MOOCs (Massive

Online Open Courses) has started to increase and now many researchers are investigating the effects of using social media on learning outcomes, student engagement, etc.… (DePietro 2013; Dumpit & Fernandez, 2017; Manca & Ranieri,

2016; Ricoy & Feliz, 2016; Bernot, Jacquemin, & Smelser, 2014). In accordance with the first stated goal, the dissertation will not address this new development in educational technology but will rather address how these technologies are “educational” outside of the classroom.

Much of the literature and discussions about both new learning technologies and social media is optimistic, with many educators and researchers proclaiming the emergence a “convergence culture” that allows “produsers” the ability to create and share and of the ability of new education technologies to bring accessible education to more people (Jenkins, 2008; Ricoy & Feliz, 2016); while others note that these new technologies offer “...opportunities to move away from the last century's highly centralized, industrial model of learning and toward individual learner empowerment through designs that focus on collaborative, networked interaction” (Mcloughlin & Lee

2008). While the importance of social media technology has been recognized and there exists much anecdotal evidence of its benefits researchers are now beginning to focus on developing more accurate methods of testing learning outcomes and developing

effective strategies for utilization (Gao, Luo, & Zhang, 2012; Greenhow & Askari, 2017;

Manca & Ranieri, 2016),

These assessments of the potential of social media technology are valuable since these technologies do present a whole new set of challenges for educators but also hold the potential to aid educators in overcoming traditional educational challenges such as student engagement and accurate assessment of student progress. However, what the current discussion misses is the broad field where social media technology, entertainment, and education overlap outside of traditional learning spaces. The use of social media for educative purposes is not the preoccupation solely of those within the traditional professions of teaching and school administration. My argument is that purposeful education, in the broader sense I hope to convey, is carried out by actors outside the traditional institutions of learning and that the field in which they operate is the world of technologically-mediated ideology and representation. My argument is therefore in favor of the centrality of a critical literacy approach to social media as entertainment and education. My position thus broadly echoes that of Masterman

(1983), but updated for our current time in which social media and social networking are ubiquitous:

The case for media education must rest upon the idea that the media are

actively involved in constructing 'reality' rather than neutrally transmitting

it. That is, they deal in representations and the ideological power of the

media is roughly proportional to the apparent naturalness of these

representations. The ideological potency of a medium arises precisely

from the power of those who control and work in it to pass off as 'real' or

'true' an inevitably partial and selective (and, in Britain, almost always

white, male, middle class, middle-aged and heterosexual) view of the

world. (p. 45)

In its analysis, my dissertation draws upon the fields of British cultural studies, Frankfurt

School critical theory and the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle, new media studies, critical media literacy, visual rhetoric, and semiotics.

This dissertation participates in the perennial discussion of the extent to which media affect audiences. A historical predecessor of some of the issues that will be addressed in the dissertation is the response of the American pragmatist philosopher

John Dewey to the ideas of his contemporary, the public intellectual Walter Lippmann, concerning the feasibility of participatory democracy. In his book, Public Opinion (1922),

Lippmann addressed the difficulty of governing a complex, democratic society in an age when communications technology was rapidly improving. It was in this book that he coined the phrase “the Manufacture of Consent” to refer to the media’s role in shaping the opinions of the public and policy makers. Lippmann’s ideas were later manipulated to great effect by Edward Bernays, the “father” of the field of public relations who applied his experience creating propaganda for the American government during the

First World War to the nascent field of marketing and advertising. Later, this phrase became important for critical media studies when Edward S. Herman and Noam

Chomsky used it in their 1988 book of the same name.

The contemporary context for this dissertation is the cluster of discussions and debates about popular media like video games and films. Several researchers have illuminated the fact that the United States military, to take one example, is intimately

involved in the development, creation, and dissemination of several popular media

within many formats (Mirrlees, 2015; Schiller, 1992; Der Derian, 2000). The purpose of

this involvement is to create media that will shape the way audiences view the military

and its actions.

The U.S. military is not the only one participating in the creation of media. The

military itself is concerned with the increasingly savvy use of media by terror groups

who not only use terror attacks to create media spectacles—which is what terrorist

attacks, in fact, are—but who also create their own media to further their own messages

(Dauber, 2009).

Social Media and Its Effects

The advent of social media and post-web 2.0 social networking sites has changed the way that both audiences and media producers participate in media. Video-

sharing sites like YouTube are of particular importance. YouTube, with its unparalleled

number of users and videos been recognized as a catalyst for a change in the

relationship between media producers and audiences (Blatterberg, 2015). YouTube’s

own statistics show that site has over one billion users and reaches more young people

than any cable network in the US. The site has been credited with dismantling the

hierarchical relationship and monopolistic control of the flow of information held by

traditional media.

Even if the effects were small, it is obvious that media, of all kinds, have a much

greater access to viewers than any official educational institution (at least in wealthy,

high tech nations). A typical student in the United States in public school will spend

between 30 and 35 hours a week in class, about 140 hours a month. However,

Americans spend almost 150 hours per month watching television, and almost 30 using mobile devices (Koblin, 2016; Nielson, 2014). Social media sites and entertainment account for around 35% of the activity of mobile device users in the USA. 24% of teens are online “almost constantly” and 92% go online at least once daily (Lenhart, 2015).

Since these devices can be used anywhere and are used only when the owner is motivated to use them they present the best opportunity access those who access media when they are most motivated and receptive; whereas a student can spend hours in a classroom yet be disengaged for much or all of that time.

Theoretical Approach

The analytical framework of the dissertation will rest on three main pillars; the theories of British Cultural Studies in the tradition of the likes of Raymond Williams and

Stuart Hall; The field of Critical Discourse Analysis pioneered by Norman Fairclough; and the semiotic theories of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School and of the Prague

Linguistic Circle, particularly the work of Yuri Lotman and Roman Jakobson. The foundation on which these pillars rest in an explicitly Marxist understanding of cultural production exemplified by the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, especially the thought of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, and Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of the “culture industry”. This Marxist foundation is highly inflected by the work of other theorists such as Walter Lippmann, Jacques Ellul, Guy Debord, John Dewey, and

Kenneth Burke.

The central theoretical thrust of the dissertation is the idea that propaganda and education must be understood as being essentially the same kind of activity; indeed, they may just be two different words for the same act in most cases. The differences between what we call “education” and what we call “propaganda” are mostly formal, pertaining to the kinds of institutions in which these activities take place, or to the subject matter that the activity concerns. Given the very pejorative, negative connotation the word “propaganda” has in contemporary English, this may seem an outlandish statement to some. However, if “propaganda” is taken back to its older, deeper meaning of “spreading” or “propagating” (versus “propagandizing”) then the comparison becomes much less implausible (Ross, 2002).

Therefore, much like the rote memorization of words and phrases only comprises a small portion of what we consider education, the production and dissemination of explicit slogans and lies with the naked intent to persuade only comprises a small portion of activity that can be considered propaganda. It will be the argument of the dissertation that the vast majority of propaganda consists in the building and the tending of an environment of information— what Walter Lippmann called a “pseudo- environment”—, a world of accessible knowledge that connects (“mediates”) people to events and phenomena. Although crude forms of explicit propaganda do exist the most effective propaganda consists in constructing or altering a whole semiologic world in which people make sense of happenings. Real propaganda sets the boundaries of the rhetorical-conceptual space, by influencing the very assumptions and information people need to make rational decisions it separates the space of the “thinkable” from the very literally “inconceivable”. This is precisely the political and social function of what

we call “education” in the sense of its modern, institutional form, as a transmitter of ideology and world views.

In addition to this world building, effective propaganda uses feelings or trends that are already present within a social grouping, amplifying and directing them to its own purposes. Other techniques of effective propaganda are the construction of an in- group “identity” (what Kenneth Burke called “identification”) and the designation of an

“other” against whom negative energies can be directed. By examining propaganda in this way the dissertation will show that propaganda happens throughout society, from advertisements to recreational games, and most pertinent, throughout social media.

Indeed, the scope, reach, and intensity of propaganda have increased tremendously as a result of the advent of social media and social networking sites.

One perennial issue which concerns any study of media and its effects is the question of just how effective, if at all, media is in shaping the beliefs and opinions of an audience. A related question concerns not just what kinds of effects media have but how audiences interpret or “read” the media texts they experience. In his seminal paper,

“Encoding/Decoding”, Stuart Hall (2006) presents a tripartite model of audiences’ decoding of media texts. Hall argues that audiences can interpret media in one of three ways; a dominant/hegemonic reading which is the “preferred” reading and aligns with the position of the media creators/encoders, a negotiated reading which is a mixture of adaptive and ambivalent positions, and the oppositional reading which in a direct contradiction to the ideological position encoded by the media creators. Hall’s model was developed to describe a media landscape that resembles the one seen in the film

Network (1976); a media landscape dominated by huge conglomerates and driven by the hunt for ratings.

Hall’s model brought an understanding of the importance class difference and ideology to the study of communications, although he didn’t address other factors affecting audience interpretations (Schrøder, 2000). However, in response to the increasing popularity of his theory other scholars began to argue that audience reactions could not be categorized so simply, and these scholars promoted a

“polysemic” approach to analyzing audience responses. Analysts like Fiske (1989) emphasized the “power and pleasure” of individuals making their own readings of media.

One famous example that complicates Hall’s schema is the “Archie Bunker

Effect”. This effect refers to the show All in the Family and its protagonist, Archie

Bunker, who was racist and sexist. The show’s creators intended for Bunker to be a negative example; however, the character became popular with a sizable portion of the audience that agreed with his views (Singhal and Rogers, 2004). The Archie Bunker

Effect shows the difficulty of determining exactly the difference between a “preferred” reading and a reading that is “dominant/hegemonic”. All in the Family’s creators, following the general social shift against overt racism and sexism, intended that viewers would come to view Bunker negatively, but some viewers read the character in a way that was against both the prevailing social trends and the intents of the show’s creators.

Were these viewers taking an “oppositional” stance?

One way to remedy this conundrum without rejecting Hall’s brilliant insights is to broaden his framework to include the possibility of each viewer or audience member occupying a multiplicity of positions relative to media at any one time while at the same time understanding that these positions exist within the matrix of a culture which is shaped by history and continues to morph through time. This would account for the changing nature of the definitions of what is “dominant/hegemonic” and “oppositional” while at the same time making possible a concrete analysis of different interpretive positions for specific social/temporal contexts.

This kind of approach is important and useful as the messages encoded in media and the nature of media themselves have changed in a manner similar to the changes that have affected the ways that media are created and distributed. Our culture can be said to now be in a period of “cultural explosion”, a period when social arrangements and structures are radically changed. During a period such as this, Ideologies and sub- cultures that exist at the periphery of the dominant culture may move to the center as the center seeks to stabilize and maintain the system (Semenenko, 2012). During a period of explosion, a position at the periphery become the very thing that allows certain ideologies and ways-of-being to occupy a new position near the center of the culture.

Understanding messages encoded in a variety of media—not just news programs, for example—in this way allows for more flexible explanations of how

“dominant” or “preferred” readings in Hall’s framework can still exist in an environment like our present social media landscape where a multiplicity of media producers and different preferred readings exists. We no longer live in the world of Network, despite the apparent tardiness of the major television networks in grasping this reality. Media

conglomerates still exist to be sure, but now the possibility exists for any person with access to the internet and an Instagram or YouTube account to offer competition with these legacy media giants. Theories of media must account for an environment in which idiosyncratic ideologies and messages are encoded but also exist within the matrix of a definite culture that is disproportionately affected by producers at the cultural center.

On Rhetoric

This essay argues that propaganda should properly be understood as a rhetorical activity. Such a definition provides a better explanation of what propaganda is than the commonsense notion that propaganda is merely “lies produced by our enemies”. This definition also explains, in part, why propaganda has such a negative reputation. Aristotle defines rhetoric as the: “ability, in each…case, to see the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle, 2007, p. 37). Thus, he defines as a skill, a potential or capacity, rather than the realized product of that capacity. The ability to see what is persuasive also gives one the ability to see what is only “apparently persuasive”, and by this Aristotle means the ability to recognize fallacious arguments that have the form of a valid argument.

However, for Aristotle, rhetoric is also practical and useful art and he compares the ability to defend oneself by means of words to the ability to defend oneself physically. Perhaps the most important reason rhetoric is useful is that by understanding persuasion one will gain the ability to defend what is just and true and therefore lead the targets of one’s rhetoric—perhaps jurors or a judge in a court of law—to decide in the

correct manner. For Aristotle (2007), the true and the just are “nature stronger than their opposites,” the bad and the unjust, and to allow the unjust to prevail over the just would be condemnable (p. 35).

In Book 1 of the Rhetoric identifies three “intrinsic” pisteis, or means of persuasion: ethos, factors relating to the character of the speaker; pathos, the emotional disposition of the listener; and logos, the ability to show the truth from what is intrinsically apparent in the situation (logic). Aristotle believes that it is wrong to “warp the jury by leading them into anger or envy or pity,” therefore he believes that the use of logic is preferable to the first two pisteis. In Book 1 of the Rhetoric (but not in the later books) Aristotle seems to argue that rhetoric should be completely based on the use of logical argumentation. Throughout the book he disparages other teachers of rhetoric who advocate using emotion or the introduction of “outside” factors and situations into an argument. Among these teachers are the Sophists; concerning them, Aristotle says that their style of rhetoric “is not a matter of ability but of deliberate choice… [of specious arguments] (p. 36). For Aristotle a sophist lacks the ability to discern the proper means of persuasion and therefore does not practice the true art of rhetoric, which he calls an “offshoot” of Socratic dialectic and ethical studies.

Aristotle was no doubt influenced in his opinions of rhetoric by his teacher Plato, the author of the Socratic dialogues. In the Phaedrus Socrates emphasizes the importance of knowledge of the subjects about which one argues and stresses logical argument. In the Gorgias Socrates and says that rhetoric is a part of flattery and a shadow of politics and that the rhetoric that the Sophists practice is not a true art since each art must know clearly what is good and bad but the Sophists argue both sides of

any argument. He gives an analogy, saying that rhetoric is to justice what cooking is to medicine. In other words, without a knowledge of what is healthy cooking and eating what merely tastes good, but is not good to the body, will cause harm to the body, just as the use of the power to persuade will cause great damage to an individual or nation if the wielder of that power does not have a clear concept of what is good. Socrates argues that the difference between philosophers and dialectic is that the former have a concept of the good and the latter is a method for coming to know the good; whereas

Gorgias, in the eponymous dialogue, praises rhetoric forgiving its practitioners the power to best even experts in a certain field in an argument.

The conflict between the philosophers and the sophists explains in great part the negative connotations associated with propaganda (of course, a great deal of the hostility is due to the fact that no one likes to feel deceived are duped into believing or agreeing to something false or inferior). The modern propagandists, starting with men like Ivy Ledbetter Lee and Edward Bernays, can be thought of as modern sophists. In the ancient debate the philosophers, the followers of Plato and Aristotle, were the historical victors and we now know of the sophists primarily through the works and opinions of the philosophers. Although the 20th century saw a change in this trend, for most of its history Western philosophy has been concerned with the search for concrete answers and rhetoric only offers the ability to persuade.

One real weakness of rhetoric is that persuasion is difficult, sometimes impossible, unless the speaker and the audience share a common frame of reference linguistically, culturally, or ideologically. The philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1987) notes that Isocrates, a sophist and contemporary of Socrates, said that when dealing with

fellow Greeks the appropriate means was persuasion, but when dealing with barbarians

(foreigners) the appropriate means is force. Blumenberg explains this difference as “one

of language and education, because persuasion presupposes that one shares a

horizon, allusions to prototypical material, and the orientation provided by metaphors

and similes” (pp. 435-436).

In order to persuade more effectively, the propagandist must engineer common

frames-of-reference. Rather than lying, what the propagandist really does is to frame a discussion, frame information and the possibilities of thought, and create a common way to think about a problem for the target audience. The propagandist draws the boundaries of what is thinkable and, as a result, conditions the conclusions the audience will reach;

Propaganda is more a matter of “framing” information so as to induce people to

draw desired conclusions than it is a matter of feeding people faulty information

and insulating them against truthful information. Framing is typically conceived of

as the careful selection of a vocabulary that prejudges the issues under

discussion (Callaway, Clary-Lemon, Ramage, & Waggoner, 2009, p. 127)

In the process of setting the bounds of an issue, propagandists create publics

(Bratich, 2014, Terranova, 2007). With modern data science and communications technology this is much easier than in previous times, but the basic goal is to create those groups for whom the propagandists can successfully generate a frame-of- reference to effect successful persuasion. Kenneth Burke (1969) called this

“identification”, the act of emphasizing certain traits or characteristics of the speaker and

the audience to create a kind of psychological closeness. This is a technique that

propaganda shares with more commercial forms of persuasion like advertising and

marketing:

One of the most important lessons propagandists learn from advertisers’

concerns techniques for carefully dividing one’s audience, an art perfected by

legions of demographic and psychographic researchers employed by marketers.

Propaganda is, to use Ellul’s social scientific term, ‘partitioned’ (Callaway, Clary-

Lemon, Ramage, & Waggoner, 2009, p. 129)

At least one commonality joins both lies and what can naively, in an epistemological sense, be called truths, or facts; that is, that those who receive both facts and lies and apprehend them with their minds, treat both as information to be processed. Lies are effective because those who believe them accept them as “truth”, and do not suspect that they could be otherwise; they have the same epistemic status as “truths”. Since human beings use not only information gained from direct experience to understand their worlds, but also make use of immaterial “information” such as “facts” and ideas to gain an understanding, the world in which they live can be molded to the extent that the information they receive can be controlled. This “informational world” is akin to what Walter Lippmann (1922) called the “pseudo-environment”.

By controlling the informational world or pseudo-environments that people’s minds inhabit, propagandists gain a large measure of control over their actions and opinions. The use of lies is one way this is possible, but it is not the most effective, since outright lies will readily be disbelieved once direct, contrary evidence is encountered.

Much more effective is the manipulation of the way information is presented. In the rhetoric Aristotle speaks of pathos and how the mental and emotional states of jurors

and judges affect their decisions, he also recognizes that the ethos, or ethical and

physical qualities of a speaker can sway an audience, and people who encounter

information in a museum or library or more likely to believe than if they had encountered

the same information during a comedy sketch. Propagandists recognize these effects

and make use of them rather than using simple lies. On this point, Jacques Ellul (2010)

is quite insightful

It is apparent that the relationship between propaganda and information is

complex and difficult to assess. Their boundaries are vague and

undefined. Almost inevitably information turns into propaganda; it makes

propaganda possible, feeds it, and renders it necessary…Once again, let

us refrain from erecting the kind of Manichean world that propaganda

suggests—one side white, the other black, a good side, a bad side—

saintly information, on the one hand, diabolical propaganda, on the other.

The truth about the devil is that he created ambiguity (p. 223)

The propagandists and the rhetorician share the ability to see the possible

means of persuasion and to exploit these possibilities. Whereas in ancient times these

possibilities consisted mainly of speech, writing, and art and the power of these was

limited by time and space—there was no recording or broadcasting technology—these

days instantaneous digital communications, broadcasting, and recording technology

have greatly amplified the possible means of persuasion. People who live in wealthy,

developed, post-industrial nations now live in a near-ubiquitous, digitally-mediated, pseudo-environment that is mostly constructed and controlled by people they do not

know and will never meet. The difference between the modern propagandist and the

ancient rhetorician is thus one of scale and scope but not one of essence or kind.

The KONY 2012 Campaign and Invisible Children

Invisible Children is an NGO that was founded in 2004 by three young American

college students; Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, and Laren Poole. The three travelled to

Africa for adventure and to get video footage, but in Northern Uganda they claim they

met child refugees who were fleeing the Lord’s Resistance Army, which made use of

child soldiers. The three friends were moved by the sight of the refugees and decided to

learn more about the conflict and to spread awareness at home. They used their film- making skills to create a documentary called, eponymously, Invisible Children.

They screened their film across the country and worked to educate decision- makers, celebrities, and politicians about Kony. Along with other NGOs, Resolve

Uganda and the Enough project, Invisible Children successfully lobbied President

Obama to sign into law the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda

Recovery Act of 2001 (Enough Project, 2010). The law states that “it is the policy of the

United States to work with regional governments” by “providing political, economic, military, and intelligence support,” to, “apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield in the continued absence of a negotiated solution, and to disarm and demobilize the remaining Lord’s Resistance Army fighters” (Lord’s

Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, 2016). The

founders of Invisible Children were in the Oval Office when Obama signed the bill into law (Richardson, 2010).

In early March of 2012 Invisible Children released another documentary, KONY

2012. This documentary was released on YouTube and was a part of the NGOs plan to massively raise awareness of Kony in 2012. It became a hit and spread virally, grossing over 100 million views in the first six days, making it the most successful video campaign of its kind (Wasserman, 2012). Time Magazine ranked the video the most viral video of all time and a poll by the Pew Research Center suggested that approximately 50% of all American youth had seen the video (Goddard, Hall, Lala,

McGarty, Stuart, & Thomas, 2015). The campaign encouraged participants to share the video with friends; to buy an “action kit” filled with campaign-branded goods like t-shirts and a military-style, dog tag bracelet; and to participate in global event called “Cover the

Night” on April 20, 2012. Those who participated in the Cover the Night event were exhorted to cover public spaces with stickers and posters of Joseph Kony, obtained from Invisible Children, in an attempt to “make Kony famous”. The Cover the Night event failed to draw the same participation as the KONY 2012 video. A sequel to the film, titled KONY 2012 Part II, was released on April 5, 2012. On October 25, 2012 IC also released another YouTube video, entitled Move, which chronicles the creation of

KONY 2012, and through this lens, the building of a youth movement that is not over and still has important work to do.

Invisible Children has been particularly successful in their efforts to lobby the US government. Their website boasts that IC has “mobilized thousands of young activists to call, write, and meet in person with their representatives and urge them to support the

protection and recovery of communities in central Africa targeted by the LRA and other

violent threats,” which has resulted in $30 Million in U.S. foreign assistance to programs

in Central Africa (Invisible Children, 2014). The NGO also claims that it was intimately

involved in pushing Congress and President Obama to pass two bills into law; one, the

aforementioned Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery

Act, and the second being S. 2318, the Department of State Rewards Program Update

and Technical Corrections Act of 2012, a law that expands the State Department’s

Reward’s for Justice Program, which financially remunerates individuals who provide

information that leads to the arrest of persons wanted for war crimes and crimes against

humanity. An official statement from the Obama White House regarding the expansion

of S.2318 specifically mentions Joseph Kony and the LRA as examples of individuals

and organizations that are targets covered by the legislation (The White House, Office

of the Press Secretary, 2013).

The KONY 2012 Video

The KONY 2012 video is a story with a narrative arc that resembles a feature

film. The video is an example of a mixed-genre media artifact and blends techniques

from different styles film; the perspectives of documentary film-making, the pacing and

imagery of action films, a storyline that blends an Avengers-style superhero team-up

film with the emotional highs of feel-good movies about disadvantaged youth. According to Hickman (2012) the film employs an “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” approach and

uses several different documentary “modes”. He finds that the film is poetic in its

cinematography and script, participatory in that it shows interactions between Russell

and several organization and individuals, expository in the way it shows graphic scenes

from Uganda, and reflexive in the way that Russell speaks about the purpose of the film

directly to the viewer. However, he finds that the film does not employ an observational

mode and lacks, “any sustained first-hand exploration of the war itself, in the villages of northern Uganda and other places directly affected by Kony’s atrocities” (p. 477). The film starts with a promise Jason Russell made to a Ugandan child named Jacob that he would get help for Jacob and return to Uganda. The video shows how Russell gathers the forces of good to go to rescue Jacob and the other Ugandan children threatened by

Kony.

Symbolically, the film sets up a contrasting binary between Uganda, its people, and Kony on one hand, and America, Russell’s life, and Russell himself on the other.

For example, there is a duality between Jason Russell's son, Gavin, and his nourishing home environment in middle-class America, and Jacob, the Ugandan boy who fled from

Kony’s LRA. Uganda is a kind of shadow world of Jason’s life, and Jason’s counterpart in that world is the villain of the story, Joseph Kony.

In the film Uganda is portrayed as a hellish world where, unlike Russell's son

Gavin, children live in constant fear and insecurity. Kony is the villain of this story and he is portrayed as the source of evil in Uganda, and must be defeated if the children of

Uganda are to have the kind of lives that Gavin enjoys. In the film Jason Russell is the protagonist but he is not necessarily the hero. In a way, the heroes of the video are the

American youth who will join forces with Russell to convince the US government to

intervene in Uganda in order to “stop Kony”.

While the video shows images of child refugees, child soldiers, and Kony's army,

the LRA, except for excerpts of interviews with Ugandan associates of IC, the viewer is

presented with virtually no other images or information about Uganda except those

relating to Kony and his crimes. What the viewer is presented with is the typical

representation of Africa and Africans as “black, masculine and barbaric; victims are

vulnerable, black women and children; and saviours are white, rational, Western men,”

and “The state is…constructed as the savage ‘other’ for failing to control barbaric behavior” (p. 99).

Five minutes and 57 seconds into the film, Jason Russell exclaims that,

regarding the situation in Uganda, “If that happened one night in America, it would be on

the cover of Newsweek” (Invisible Children, 2012). At four minutes and 40 seconds, a

uniformed Ugandan man appears from out of the shadows and orders Russell to stop

filming an interview with Jacob. The purpose of these images is to elicit a sense of guilt

and urgency from the target audience who, according to Fitzgerald (2013), is largely

young, affluent, White-American, and female. As mentioned above, propaganda is

“partitioned”, or targeted towards certain demographics and segments of the population,

in much the same way that consumer goods are and these affluent American youth are

the target audience for this film. The images of suffering, poverty, and state censorship

are intended to motivate the viewer to join the campaign to “Get Kony”.

Musically, visually, and in terms of overall aesthetics the video are clearly marketed towards post-millennial American youth. The video and online campaign materials are quite inclusive and do not only show White youth but also include images of children of various ethnicities. This multi-racial/multi-ethnic inclusion gives the campaign a much broader appeal. But the use of racist imagery and “White Savior” logic demonstrates that this is simply a veneer of inclusion and the film makers’ understanding of racial inclusion, much like their understanding of the complex political situation in Uganda, is shallow. The presence of youth of color in the campaign is similar to the “inclusive” marketing campaigns carried out by companies such as Italian clothing manufacturer The Benetton Group’s “United Colors of Benetton” campaign

(Barela, 2003; Tinic, 1997) .

In order to appeal to youth the film includes of-the-moment cultural artefacts with which young people would be familiar. For example, during the section of the film that introduces IC's plan to launch the “Cover the Night” guerilla marketing campaign on

April 20, the music of electronic music producer Flux Pavilillion plays in the background.

Flux Pavillion creates music in the genre known to most young Americans as "EDM"

(Electronic Dance Music), which had exploded in popularity around the time of the video. The use of this particular style of music shows that the filmmakers understand their audience well and have strategically fashioned the film to appeal to this audience's sensibilities.

The film also heavily exploits the American concept of youth as a time of rebellion and participation in social causes. The film feeds back to its audience images of themselves as a powerful source for revolution and social change. The entire KONY

2012 campaign can be seen as a commodification of popular conceptions of radical left

revolution. The images of youth running through urban environments while spray- painting political slogans on concrete, the red and black color scheme—traditionally the colors associated with Communism and the left—and the $30 "action kit" are clear examples of the appropriation of radical imagery in order to lend the campaign an aura of “radical chic”.

The "action kit" could be purchased from the IC website and contained bracelets, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and buttons branded with the logos and colors of the KONY

2012 campaign. An IC advertisement for the kit declares: “People will think you're an advocate of awesome with this official Action Kit. Since KONY 2012 is a yearlong campaign, you can decorate yourself and the town all year long with this one-stop shop”

(Kennedy, T. M., Middleton, J. I., & Ratcliffe, K., 2017, p. 97). The "action kit" is a

“revolution-in-a-box”, an off-the-shelf “solution” borne of a consumer culture in which identities are formed through purchases. It represents revolution as a brand, as a lifestyle, but not as a means of actual challenging the dominant institutions of society.

Such branding and commodification are not unique to the KONY 2012 campaign. Other politically-orientated campaigns that targeted youth with slick branding and marketing will be discussed in Chapter 5.

Review of Literature Concerning KONY 2012

The KONY 2012 video and campaign immediately drew interest and scrutiny from journalists, activists, and researchers. Many considered it a perfect example of clicktivism, or what Evgeny Morozov (2009) calls “slacktivism”. The failure of the Cover the Night event to generate the same general enthusiasm as the online video has been explored by Goddard, Hall, Lala, McGarty, Stuart, and Thomas (2015), who ask: “Are online mobilization and traditional socio-political action qualitatively different phenomena that need to be explained in different ways, or are they aspects of the same thing?” (p.

356). In order to answer this question, they explore whether online and traditional mobilization phenomena have the same psychological underpinnings and explore the nature and function of social identity in modern forms of social action. Their study found support for the idea that movements like KONY 2012 operate by creating a sense of solidarity amongst those who share similar opinions about justice and the way the world should be that crosses social categorical group boundaries. The researchers did not find, however, evidence that participation in the campaign was dependent on some type of “global identity”.

These findings are corroborated by Finnegan (2013a) who interviewed 60

Invisible Children student activists and employees. Finnegan found that Invisible

Children was “very successful in mobilizing affluent, Christian, and largely female activists to ‘save Africa’ from itself” (p. 31). Finnegan found that most IC activists were affluent and aware of their privilege, and, as a result, probably felt some guilt about the discrepancy between their own lives and those of the Ugandans portrayed in the video.

One activist she interviewed admitted that participating in the campaign afforded her “an attractive way to get involved, and…a sexy way to get involved” (p. 33). Finnegan

concludes that Invisible Children offered its mostly affluent, White female supporters “an

easy, non-contentious form of activism that does not threaten the students’ futures”, nor

directly challenge existing institutions and authorities; as one male activist said, Invisible

Children are unlike anti-WTO protestors in that they want to “work within the system”

(pp. 33-34).

Finnegan (2013b) argues that Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 campaign is a part of a

Noncontentious form of activism for privileged young Americans that is unlikely to

lead to sustainable social change in Africa or the United States because it

sponsors a narrative in which Africa remains an object to be manipulated by

outsiders instead of a dynamic context with talented and knowledgeable actors,

compelling ideas, and potential resources (p. 137)

Finnegan performed ethnographic fieldwork with IC activists in Uganda and the United

States. The fieldwork was carried out in two phases, during which Finnegan interviewed forty-eight people involved with IC. Through the many interviews and time spent observing IC operations in the US and in Uganda Finnegan concludes that, “In the end,

Invisible Children’s efforts are much more about the privileged young American participants and their journeys of identity than real sustainable social change in Africa,” and that the KONY 2012 campaign reinforces the trend of U.S. militarism and imperialism on the African continent, represented by the establishment of the AFRICOM by President George W. Bush in 2007.

Attempting to explain the appeal of Ugandan tragedy to Western audiences,

Edmonson (2012) conjectures that, whereas the problems of South Sudan or the Congo

are too extreme, and those of Kenya and Tanzania are too tame, those of Uganda are

within a Goldilocks “just right” level of tragedy such that keeps Westerners interested

without shocking them too much. Edmonson ponders the reasons why KONY 2012

does not delve into the actions of Joseph Kony’s LRA in neighboring countries such as

Congo and the Central African Republic which are more current and more devastating

that the LRA’s activity in Uganda.

Harsin (2013) approaches the video and its viral phenomenon from a

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (CCCS) framework, asking “WTF was

KONY 2012?”, Harsin argues that no theory has sufficiently explained the online viral

success of the video yet its subsequent failure to mobilize masses in the “Cover the

Night” event (beyond alluding to the well-publicized mental breakdown of IC co-founder

Jason Russell). Harsin posits that the KONY 2012 viral phenomenon offers scholars of

CCCS a chance to create the “digital age equivalent” of David Morley’s (1986) landmark

Family Television study. Harsin also explores the importance of affect, emotional contagion, and social media and conjectures that recent work on mirror neurons might be helpful in explaining the bandwagon effect seen in phenomena like KONY 2012.

Harsin suggests that KONY 2012 could be a powerful example that would allow a return to thinking about ideology after a turn in towards cultural populism in Critical Theory that

“romanticized the audience-agent as resistant to hegemony”, but failed to understand that “resistance was not really politics, especially when it was reduced to reading text against the grain” (p. 268).

Engelhardt and Jansz (2014) explore the moral pressure the Kony video exerted

on viewers and how the media and online backlash mitigated its effects. The authors

discuss the ability of Invisible Children to overcome a “post-humanitarian” “crisis of pity” which has caused a heightened suspicion of towards the authenticity and representations of suffering. In the post-humanitarian period humanitarian organizations focus on branding and shift from challenges to political structures towards more apolitical, issue-specific appeals (p. 471). The authors performed an email survey of

204 participants in which only two had not heard of the KONY 2012 campaign. The authors conclude that the success of the KONY campaign is a result of IC’s focus on individuals—Jason Russell, his son, and the Ugandan boy Jacob—rather than on the complex political situation within Uganda; Russell stands as an intermediary between the largely Western audience and the Ugandan turmoil portrayed in the video. The authors conclude that this is how IC was able to circumvent the problem of what

Chouliaraki (2013) calls the “Ironic Spectator”, an ambivalent figure who is both

skeptical to moral appeals yet open to offering help.

Archer-Brown, Bal, Hall, and Robson (2013) use a theory of viral marketing to

analyze the Kony 2012 video in order to help marketers better understand how to use

YouTube and other such platforms to spread their messages. They use Mills’ (2012)

SPIN framework— spreadability, propagativity, integration and nexus—to analyze the

KONY 2012 phenomenon and to compare the viral spread of the KONY 2012 video to

the infamous video of Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell’s mental breakdown.

Rejecting the idea that all viral marketing is simply web-amplified word-of-mouth

marketing (WOMM) they use a definition of viral marketing from Mills (2012), defining viral marketing as:

The strategic release or seeding of branded content into the socially networked

online consumer ecosystem, followed by the potentially multiplicative spread of

the content through the ecosystem as hosts (consumers) receive the content and

are motivated to share the branded content with other consumers (p. 203)

This definition of viral marketing is preferable to the WOMM definition since it recognizes that a viral phenomenon is self-propelled, exponential, and based on an artifact (like a video) rather than on information alone.

Briones, Janoske, and Madden (2016) explore social media as a double-edged sword that both helped IC’s cause and caused trouble for the organization. The authors found that social media allowed IC to spread its message quickly but that it also allowed for criticism and negative feedback to inundate the organization. Their study found that several factors contributed to the meteoric success of KONY 2012, including: connection to a global audience, tapping into key influencers (celebrities and policymakers), and IC’s ability to bring a new issue to global awareness.

In the wake of an announcement by Invisible Children that due to falling donations and revenue the organization would have to cease operations by the end of

2015, Cheney (2015) examines the lasting effects Invisible Children and the KONY2012 campaign might have on future international youth activism. Cheney notes that while most people over the age of 30 had probably never heard of Invisible Children, the NGO had been actively building up a network of activists and disseminating materials such as

their pre-KONY 2012 documentary, Invisible Children: The Rough Cut. Cheney, like

Engelhardt and Jansz (2014) sees the KONY 2012 video as an example of

“spectacular” or “ironic” spectatorship that operates on a politics of pity while perpetuating global inequality. Cheney also echoes the critique that KONY 2012 was a

“post-humanitarian” commodification and corporatization of activism. Cheney explains that the “distinction between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like IC, and businesses, is…increasingly blurred,” and that this blurring was a conscious strategy on

the part of IC (p. 9). According to Cheney, the KONY 2012 campaign was successful in

part because it operated on a politics of fear, and that IC had “built an anti-intellectual organizational culture” in which members prided themselves on “at least doing something” about problems in Uganda.

Sebastian and Titeca (2014) examine the failure of the KONY 2012 campaign and Invisible Children’s eventual reduction of activities using an all-too-appropriate private sector business model. The authors mention the influence on Invisible Children’s leaders of the ideas of entrepreneur-philanthropist Dan Pallotta. Pallotta, who also was a member of IC’s advisory board, argues that charities should be run according to private sector principles. Pallotta advocates “multiplication philanthropy”2, the idea that

charities should employ “market-based models [that] prioritize surplus-centered risk and

large investments in personnel as a way of generating the largest possible return on

their investment”. Sebastian and Titeca argue that, under the sway of this paradigm, IC

made “Dubious, exaggerated, and sometimes incorrect casual relations and

information…in order to simplify the conflict and inflate Invisible Children’s role in

2 https://hbr.org/2012/02/multiplication-philanthropy

stopping it”. The authors note that, ironically, KONY 2012, which was intended to increase IC’s audience and extend their influence, actually led to the failure of the organization’s operations since the exaggerations presented in the video generated criticism and a backlash that interfered with IC’s fundraising efforts at their huge national tours, one of their chief sources of revenue.

Chapter Description

The dissertation will proceed in a series of chapters analyzing different propagandistic facets of the KONY 2012 humanitarian campaign. The dissertation will analyze the use of images, sounds, and words used in these cases but will also investigate the stories behind this instances of social media use by asking the questions: For what purpose was the media used? Who was the target audience?,

What kind of change in the viewer was desired by the creators of the media? What follows is a summary of each chapter.

Chapter 1: The History of Propaganda will contain a discussion and clarification of the definition and history of propaganda; questions concerning the ambiguity of the status of propaganda will be discussed and different definitions of propaganda given by various researchers will be examined. Particularly in Anglophone countries the word

“propaganda” conjures up images of Orwellian totalitarian regimes strictly controlling individual expression and constantly pumping slogans into the people’s brains. This reaction to the concept of propaganda itself is a result of propaganda, since after the

First World War Americans became incensed when they learned that they had in fact 42

been the target of propaganda from the United Kingdom and their own government, therefore attaching a negative connotation to the term (Bernays, 2005; Taylor, 2003).

Those who are quick to associate propaganda with lies propagated by “unfree regimes” have forgotten (or, perhaps they never knew) that many of the pioneers of propaganda were Americans like Ivy Ledbetter Lee, George Creel, Walter Lippmann, and Edward

Bernays. In truth, both the aforementioned pioneers of propaganda and modern practitioners employ much more subtle means and techniques that mere falsehoods

(Wimberly, 2017). In order to dispel the myth of propaganda as lie this first chapter will examine the history of propaganda from its inception in the post-Reformation Catholic

Church and present an overview of the theories of prominent researchers of propaganda that offer a fuller understanding of how it operates.

Chapter 2: Dewey and Lippmann: Propaganda as a Technology of Governance and the Place of Education will deal with the early history of propaganda and public relations in America, illustrating the necessity for conceiving of propaganda more broadly in an age inundated with instant electronic communications and social media.

This chapter will begin with a discussion of John Dewey’s response to Walter

Lippmann’s ideas about communication and society in his book, Public Opinion, and its implications for understanding propaganda and education today. Chapter 2 will conclude by examining the ways that propaganda has transformed in the contemporary age of social media using the KONY 2012 phenomenon as a guide.

In Chapter 3: Analyzing Kony 2012: Augmenting Stuart Hall's En/De-Coding

Model with a Multidimensional Model and Lotman's Semiosphere, Stuart Hall’s model of encoding and de-coding and some ways it can be improved for a new media

environment will be discussed. Using a multidimensional model of audience reception and Yuri Lotman’s ideas about cultural explosion some possible reasons for why the

KONY 2012 campaign reached such popularity will be discussed. The real life example of the television program All in the Family will be introduced to illustrate the difficulties encountered by adhering strictly to the model as proposed by Hall. The Multi- dimensional model for audience reception studies developed by Christian Schroder

(Schrøder, 2000) and concepts of the semiosphere and “cultural explosion” developed by Russian-Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman (2009) will be discussed as theoretical frameworks that can be used in conjunction with Hall’s insights for the purpose of analyzing texts and audience receptions of texts.

Chapter 4: The Military-Entertainment-Complex and Kony 2012 as Militainment

Recruitment Strategy for Virtuous War examines the KONY 2012 phenomenon as an expression of the Military-Entertainment-Complex (MEC) or the Military-Industrial-

Communications-Complex. These concepts refer to the nexus of military, industrial, and communications/media interests and powers that cooperate and serve to further the interests of the US military and empire. These powers are focused not only towards foreign populations but also toward America’s domestic population. The MICC concept was formulated by Herbert Schiller in the late 1960s and provides a means of theorizing and explaining the ways in which the nominally independent “fourth estate” buttresses and supports the goals of the military and government within the planes of the mind and ideology (Schiller, 1992). The MIME-NET concept, formulated by James Der Derian

(2000), is a development of Schiller’s MICC concept and focuses on the incorporation of popular culture (movies, television programs, videogames) into the US military’s

propaganda activities. Many critical media scholars now use the term “militainment” to describe this overlap between military marketing/propaganda and pop culture entertainment (Mirrlees, 2015; Stahl, 2010).

The militainment concept is very similar to the main conceptual proposition of the dissertation in that militainment is not a crude, explicit form of propaganda but the incorporation of militaristic themes into popular culture and pop culture into the military, leading to an entertainment media environment in which players and audiences absorb the ideology of the military without having to think about it directly. Similar to Walter

Benjamin (1973) calls “distraction”, audiences or gamers can form “habits” of thought or deal with new concepts while they watch or while they play. The manipulation of semiotic space to cultivate certain opinions and habits of thought—even motor skills if

one thinks of combat simulator video games—is educative in the sense of “drawing

forth” these habits and values from target audiences. Indeed, America’s Army, a military

shooter game developed for the purpose of recruitment by the US Army that will be

discussed in this chapter, is described as an “educative” or “informative” game by its

creators. Viewed from the standpoint of education we could call this the network the

Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Education-Network (MIMEE-NET). The

implanting of these themes and messages is not happenstance or just simply “giving the

market what it wants” but is a conscious, deliberate activity:

Media images of and messages about wars do not emerge out of thin air,

but are often produced by military public affairs officers in conjunction with

the cultural workers of media corporations. These representations of war

are scripted, stage-managed, packaged, and sold to publics through

media products that justify and legitimize the state’s monopoly on violence

(Mirrlees, 2015, p. 74)

This chapter will end by analyzing KONY 2012 as a MICC/MEC text by means of comparing certain sequences in KONY 2012 to a famous scene from a game in the popular Call of Duty series. This scene, and the overall aesthetic of the KONY 2012 video will be analyzed as an example of the shift in culture from what Guy Debord

(1994) calls “the spectacle” to a more first-person, virtual aesthetic experience that places the viewer “within” the media.

Chapter 5: The Integrated Spectacle: Manufacturing Dissent with Networks and

Propaganda will analyze KONY 2012 as a propaganda product influenced by discourses of “people power” and “digital diplomacy” emanating out of the United States government around the time of the release of the video. This chapter will show that

KONY 2012 was not an isolated event but was just one instance of an established US policy to influence the opinions of target populations in order to effect social change in a way beneficial to the United States. This chapter will demonstrate that the KONY 2012 campaign satisfies the definition of propaganda developed in this essay and largely borrowed from Ellul; that propaganda is a rhetorical activity directed toward a politically significant group in order to persuade said group to carry out some action.

In the Conclusion, Propaganda in a Post-Social Media Age, the major points expressed in the preceding chapters will be covered and the material covered will be used to examine contemporary trends in social media and to extrapolate some possible implications these trends might have for exercise of propaganda of the type defined in this essay. The 2017 YouTube “Adpocalypse” and an academic study of the use of 46

Facebook to spread social contagion and affect users’ mental states will be examined as examples of the development of social media affording the potential for more intensive propaganda. The implications of these developments for society and the role of education in combating the more negative outcomes will also be discussed.

CHAPTER 1: THE HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA

Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I

stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has

been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and

enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do

care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and

silent (Dubois, 1994, p. 103)

Propaganda is usually regarded as an evil; this in itself makes a study difficult. To

study anything properly, one must put aside ethical judgments. Perhaps an

objective study will lead us back to them, but only later, and with full cognizance

of the facts (Ellul, 1965, p. x)

Wartime propaganda was a form of rhetoric. Its goal was to rally us to the

colours, to persuade men and women to die for our cause, not to explain the

facts or to weigh evidence objectively (Williams, 2004, p. 14)

The words in the first quotation above were spoken by W.E.B. Dubois at an

NAACP annual conference in 1929, held to celebrate Carter G. Woodson’s receipt of the Twelfth Spingarn Medal. At the meeting Dubois spoke on art and its importance for the struggle of African Americans and their future. In his speech Dubois uses the word

“propaganda” in a way that would seem strange to a contemporary audience. The

usage is strange in two ways. First, Dubois identifies art as a type of propaganda. This is strange because the general understanding is that art is devoid of the type of partisan and mendacious motivations that characterize of propaganda. Second, the usage is strange because Dubois speaks of propaganda in a neutral, if not positive, way. He even claims that his own writing is propaganda for the cause of Black rights. If Dubois had any problem with propaganda, it is that it has been used as a tool by only one side in a struggle, in this case by White Americans against African Americans.

Dubois’ unabashed usage and promotion of propaganda for the purpose of social justice would seem strange today given propaganda’s connection in the popular consciousness to oppressive regimes like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. But,

Dubois was writing in the early 20th century, when the word and the act had very different meanings. Although, at the precise time that he made his speech, the word had begun to take on the connotations which it has today. Before the two world wars of the first half of the 20th century propaganda was a very much neutral term and Dubois’ usage of the word to describe African-American counterpropaganda would not seem out of place.

In fact, many social movements which might today be considered positive made extensive use of propaganda. For example, the anti-slavery and abolition movements in the United States and Brazil used posters, tracts, cartoons, and chapbooks to argue the case against slavery (Wood, 2013). Many of the most iconic images and artifacts from the period or the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade—such as the famous diagram of the slave ship Brooke’s or Josiah Wedgewood’s famous image of a chained Black slave, Am I Not

a Man and a Brother?—were part of campaigns against the institution of slavery and the slave trade (Glickman, 2015).

In order to understand why Dubois advocated propaganda for African-Americans

the concept of propaganda in a fuller sense must be salvaged. Propaganda should be

understood as a type of speech or a genre; or, as a specialized type of purposeful

behavior. By understanding propaganda in this way, we are able to understand Dubois

statement as he would have understood it: He was advocating for purposeful, rhetorical

activity in favor of the cause of social justice and anti-racism.

In order for the term “propaganda” to be useful in effectively identifying a particular type of speech the pejorative connotation and the history of the word must be traced. The pejorative connotation is that “propaganda” signifies mere lies or “tall tales”.

According to this particular gloss, “propaganda” is a type of speech which consists of falsehoods and is used to persuade—or trick—people to do or believe something, usually of a malicious nature. Although this describes much of the speech that can be designated as propaganda such a simplistic definition several key aspects of propaganda.

Identifying propaganda is more difficult than simply demonstrating that a certain statement is counter-factual and proposes a state or situation which is in obvious contravention of some manifest, mutually-recognized state of affairs about which all people agree3. If differentiating between truth and falsity were such simple matter

3 Even those who doubt the veracity of matters of scientific consensus such as global warming and Darwin’s theory of natural selection frequently make appeals—however inaptly— to scientific or quasi-scientific theories and techniques. Speech does not have to be composed of falsities in order to be persuasive. More and more, speech that is logical in form—avoidance of rhetorical and formal logical fallacies—and liberally peppered with facts and information is the most persuasive. This trend was remarked upon by French philosopher, Jacques Ellul: “Modern man worships “facts”—that is, he accepts “facts” as the ultimate reality. He is convinced that what is, is good. He 50

human life would be much simpler; there would be almost no need for courts of law,

police investigations, financial audits, or deliberative bodies of any sort. Unfortunately,

discriminating between what is “false” and what is “true” is not so simple, and one does

not have to subscribe to radical philosophical skeptical theories4 to understand that many disagreements are not simply disagreements over facts but rather disagreements over interpretations of happenings, situations, and data5.

Even when two well-informed individuals are in agreement about the “facts” there

is usually still disagreement deriving from competing interpretations of those facts. An

interesting example of this in the field of science is an anecdote from Nuell Pharr Davis

(1968), quoted in Harris’ (1993) Linguistics Wars, concerning the theoretical physicists

Luis Alvarez and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Alvarez is, anecdotally, supposed to have

said of Oppenheimer:

Oppenheimer and I often have the same facts on a question and come to

opposing decisions...Oppenheimer has high intelligence. He can’t be

analyzing and interpreting the facts wrong. I have high intelligence. I can’t

be wrong. So with Oppenheimer it must be insincerity, bad faith—perhaps

treason (p. 160)

Thus, two individuals can have available the same information and come to differing

conclusions based on that information, for whatever reason. And, in some cases, the

difference is attributed to some disingenuity on the part of one or the other.

believes that facts in themselves provide evidence and proof, and he willingly subordinates values to them; he obeys what he believes to be necessity, which he somehow connects with the idea of progress…” (Ellul, 1965: xv) 4 philosophical voluntarism—the theory that reality “can be manipulated at will” 5 Despite the colorful example given in George Orwell’s 1984, propaganda in the real world really only exists within the realm of assertoric and problematic statements. It is not used to change a person’s perception or belief in the apodictic realm of basic mathematical truths. 51

Following from this it should also be obvious that a person may espouse a minority opinion which is taken to be pure falsehood by his peers, but which is believed wholeheartedly by the person himself. If such a person were to publish his ideas in the form of a book or some tract we could not say that he is “lying” as such, since the position he espouses is not for him consciously or obviously contrary to fact. Following from this it is also quite obvious that the same person will not see his own ideas as false

(if he is sincere) but might use that adjective to describe the ideas of those in the majority. A lie, then, should be defined as statements, representing a state of affairs which even the liar believes to be contrary to fact, made deliberately and consciously, most likely to the benefit of the one telling the lie. It would be helpful to remember some insights from Harry Frankfurt’s (2005) essay, On Bullshit. Frankfurt posits that liars make their statements with a particular state of mind, the intent to deceive (mens rea), and, in contrast to bullshitters, quite concerned with truth-values. After all, to successfully lie, one must already have a firm notion of what the truth actually is in order to evade it; the bullshitter does not share this concern. Frankfurt argues that those who undertake bullshit are free from the constraints of truth and falsity and are concerned neither with reporting the truth nor misrepresenting it; and, while bullshitters and liars both represent themselves as telling the truth, the bullshitter’s main goal is to conceal his true aim, which is to obfuscate and muddle inquiry and the search for truth.

Therefore, propaganda is not a lie but analogous to what Frankfurt (2005) calls

“bullshit”, but they are not necessarily equal according to the definitions of propaganda presented in this essay.

There are some major differences between Frankfurt’s (2005) description of bullshit and propaganda as defined here. Perhaps most important, Frankfurt’s position toward bullshit is normative; he obviously believes that we ought not engage in it and that it is an enemy of truth. The present definition of propaganda takes no such normative stand for or against propaganda but identifies propaganda as a rhetorical activity and a technology for the management of society. Another difference follows from the first, namely, that Frankfurt’s normative stand in relation to bullshit assumes a much more clearly delineated distinction between truth and bullshit than exists in practice. As Wakeham (2017) explains, Frankfurt’s position: “Presumes a kind of privileged epistemic position in order to readily identify and discern which claims are true and which are bullshit” (p. 18). By contrast, the understanding of propaganda presented here recognizes that the power of propaganda is derived from the inevitable epistemic ambiguity and divergent interpretations that compromise most of what people claim to “know”. If this were not true, propaganda would have no effect. Wakeham’s

(2017) comments on bullshit reflect the present presentation of propaganda:

One might argue that bullshit tends to work more effectively in those areas of

reality that are more complex and harder to grasp and where people’s knowledge

is less certain. Those aspects of reality marked by a high degree of uncertainty,

ambiguity, or complexity are thus more susceptible to the problem of bullshit (p.

18)

Here, the word “bullshit” could be replaced by the word “propaganda” and the result would be the definition of the latter given in this essay.

The most effective propaganda usually avoids addressing questions of truth and falsity, tending rather to work on emotions or other such mental states like belief.

Appeals to emotion or appeals to shared common interest and identity are not in the

strict sense “lies”, although they may be called “rhetorical fallacies” in many cases. A

person who has been manipulated or persuaded by means of clever appeals to emotion

to believe a certain thing or act a certain way may later feel that he has been deceived,

but though he might be justified in feeling thus he cannot say that he had been lied to. In

the final analysis, assigning a pejorative connotation to the word “propaganda” makes

value judgments of all statements that designate certain speech acts as propaganda.

Value judgments cannot be true or false, they are basically indicators of the attitude of

the one making the judgement about the thing that is judged.

An insistence in clinging to the pejorative connotation of the word “propaganda”

therefore lacks analytical utility. Such usage reveals more about the person(s) labelling

an instance of speech or activity as “propaganda” than it does about that speech itself.

Using the word “propaganda” with a pejorative meaning is logically roughly equivalent to

some kind of ad hominem attack or simple name-calling levelled at some particular

example of speech or communication but does not aid in any analysis of the content,

intent, or effects of that communication. Conceiving of propaganda as a purposeful

rhetorical activity strips away the value judgments allowing for a better analysis of how

propaganda, both particular and general, works.

The Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith

In order to identify and analyze propaganda meaningfully the pejorative

connotation must be discarded. A neutral view of propaganda as a set of techniques

and tactics that can be used by anyone espousing any position is more useful. In order

to understand why this is so, a recapitulation of the history of the term and the activities

which it describes is helpful. The term “propaganda” was first used by the Catholic

Church. “Propaganda” was first used to refer to the Sacra Congretio de Propaganda

Fide, a special ministry within the Catholic Church that was formally established by

Pope Gregory XV in 1622 with the Papal Bull “Inscrutabili Divinae”. The mission of the

new congregation was twofold: the reconquest of lands the Church lost as a result of the Reformation; and also, the evangelization of the peoples in newly discovered lands in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Therefore, the jurisdiction and powers of the new congregation were vast, since all lands that were not under the authority of a Catholic government fell within its purview.

Pendergast and Pendergast (2013) show that the term, “propaganda”, itself

comes from the gerundive form of the Latin verb “propagare”, however, Gregory uses

several forms of the verb throughout the bull. The verb had several meanings in Latin:

“It could mean ‘to propagate or generate,’ or, by extension, it could mean ‘to increase,

enlarge’. It appears to have been most often used by Cicero…to signify ‘conquest’ or

spreading one’s territory out into new areas” (p. 24). Prior to the issuance of the bull and

the establishment of the bull and the establishment of the congregation the word had

many neutral connotations but was uncommon and “It seems to have been carefully

chosen by the Pope, or one of his writers, to add to the sense of a religious Crusade

implied in its frequent association with ‘bellum’ by Cicero” (p. 24).

This figurative connection to waging war and conquest stemmed, no doubt, from

Gregory XV’s purposes in establishing the congregation. It is clear from the bull that the

pope was concerned with the success of the Reformation in Europe. He refers to

Protestantism as “the enemy” that has “sown weeds over the good seeds throughout

the North, and in this way has spread dreadful infections and has already destroyed

innumerable souls, provinces, and even kingdoms” (Pendergast and Pendergast, 2013,

p. 21). The language used by Gregory XV portrays Protestantism as a destructive force

that must be combatted, thereby giving to the previously neutral term, “propaganda”,

“something akin to its modern meaning of actively spreading one’s ideological truths to

those who are either ignorant of these truths or allied to other, quite opposed, truths.”

(Pendergast and Pendergast, 2013, p. 23)

Gregory XV also uses the term with other connotations that are instructive for understanding propaganda in our time. His call to establish a specific congregation of the Church tasked with spreading the Catholic faith throughout the world shows the explicitly purposive nature of propaganda. Also, the pontiff uses the verb in a particular form, the present passive infinitive “propagari”, which means “to be perpetuated or increased. The pope uses this form of the verb to refer to the activities of Protestants in their proselytizing and generating of lost souls, turning men into “beasts” who are destined for “the eternal fires prepared by the Devil and his messengers” (Pendergast and Pendergast, 2013, p. 21). Therefore, Gregory XV reframes propaganda as a neutral activity, that could be carried out by both Catholics and Protestants and could be

“profoundly good—a tool that would enable the shepherd to lead his sheep back to the

fold—or it could be terribly malicious, leading nations (nationes) to renounce their humanity” (Pendergast and Pendergast, 2013, p. 25).

This recapitulation of the history of the term helps us to understand propaganda in the way described above, as Dubois would have understood it. Pope Gregory XV’s bull both initiated the widespread use of the term and anticipated the various connotations the word would acquire later. In the bull, propaganda is used in neutral, almost horticultural or agricultural ways; as the seeding, spreading, and cultivating of the true faith throughout the world. However, Gregory XV also uses the word in ways that show that he thinks that the propaganda of the Protestants is evil. He likens the spread of Protestantism to an infection that turns men into beasts and propagates damned souls. Thus, within one, foundational document we have a demonstration of the richness of the meaning of this word.

Therefore, in the final analysis, to cling to the pejorative use of the term is to commit the fallacy of presentism by assuming that the connotations the word has today it has always had. In addition, or petitio principii, a form of begging the question, is committed since bound up with the idea of propaganda is the related notion that the person whose speech is described as propaganda is untruthful. Thinking of propaganda in this way lacks any analytical power since the term can only be used to designate the ideas or speech of someone we disagree with. The propaganda scholar Philip M. Taylor

(1995) is particularly insightful on this point:

We must thus beware the dangers of extrapolating twentieth-century perception

on to our understanding of earlier periods. The same might equally be said for

the notion of propaganda as we currently (mis)understand it—but only if we fail to

regard it as a neutral process of persuasion. If we do this, we fall into the trap of

labelling something ‘good propaganda’ or ‘bad propaganda’, as a persuasive

process which we judge from the standpoint of our own core values. Thus, the

process earns approval because we agree with it, and disapproval because we

disagree with it. Propaganda becomes something which is done by others we

differ from who are selling a cause which we repudiate; hence they are telling lies

or, at best, not telling us ‘the truth’—and we are back to where we started from.

When one person’s beliefs become another’s propaganda, we have already

begun to take sides in a subjective manner. Propaganda analysis demands

objectivity if it is to be undertaken effectively (pg. 5)

Now, having demonstrated that propaganda is best understood in neutral terms as a purposive, rhetorical type of speech or activity by means of an analysis of its etymological origins, an overview of some of the major conceptions of propaganda is fitting. Beginning in the early 20th century, soon after the First World War propaganda became an object of interest and intense study, no doubt owing to its widespread use during that conflict. In order to explain propaganda’s power to influence people’s thought and to move them to action, theorists began to build frameworks and models of propaganda. In this section the frameworks of Harold Lasswell, Noam Chomsky and

Edward S. Herman, and Jacques Ellul and the importance of each for understand propaganda will be discussed.

Harold Lasswell

The intentional circulation of ideas by propaganda helps to overcome the psychic

resistances to whole-hearted participation in war (Lasswell, 1938, p. 11)

Writing in the aftermath of the First World War, and with another war in Europe looming on the horizon, Lasswell (1938) clearly prioritized the relation of propaganda to war. In his study, Propaganda Technique in the World War, he enumerated the military powers of the state:

Propaganda is one of the three chief implements of operation against a

belligerent enemy: — Military Pressure (The coercive power of the land,

sea and air forces). Economic Pressure (Interference with access to

sources of material, markets, capital and labour power). Propaganda

(Direct use of suggestion) (p. 9)

For Lasswell, propaganda’s military utility lies in its power to affect the psychology of its targets and to boost morale. He contrasts the use of propaganda to affect mood to the other factors during wartime that can affect the public’s opinions of war, such as those factors stemming from the physical hardships and deprivations caused by war:

By propaganda is not meant the control of mental states by changing such

objective conditions as the supply of cigarettes or the chemical

composition of food. It refers solely to the control of opinion by significant

symbols, or, to speak more concretely and less accurately, by stories,

rumours, reports, pictures and other forms of social communication.

Propaganda is concerned with the management of opinions and attitudes

by the direct manipulation of social suggestion rather than by altering

other conditions in the environment or in the organism (pp. 8-9).

Symbols and information and their effects on the way people think—and thus, presumably, act—are therefore the focus of Laswell’s analysis of propaganda. The manipulation of symbols and mind are necessary for the furtherance of military aims.

War was the context in which Lasswell studied propaganda and therefore he concentrates on its uses during World War I: “The intentional circulation of ideas by propaganda helps to overcome the psychic resistances to whole-hearted participation in war” (Lasswell, 1938, p. 11).

This manipulation of the mind is necessary because civilians are not trained in the same way as soldiers. Laswell (1938) recognizes that soldiers are utilities that have to be made. He explains that the manufacture of the soldier takes place in the

“dehumanizing environment” of the military camp. Civilians are not subject to the harsh, transformational process that is the military training camp. Therefore, in order to achieve a unity of action for civilians “a repetition of ideas rather than movements” is necessary

(p. 11). Laswell states that: “The civilian mind is standardized by news and not by drills.

Propaganda is the method by which this process is aided and abetted” (p. 11). It is important to note that during World War I, and in Laswell’s analysis, the “whole-hearted”

participation in war is not manifested by all of the citizens becoming literal soldiers. Of

course, propaganda was used for purposes of recruitment, but for those who never

went to the battlefield participation was characterized by actions such as failing to

challenge—if not actively supporting—the rationale given for the war or accepting a

lower standard of living due to rationing.

Lasswell thus identifies news as (one form of) propaganda and a key to regimenting the collective civilian mind in wartime. This move to the psychological plane is necessary since, in Laswell’s mind, unlike times past peace, and not war, is now regarded as the normal state of society. Therefore, in order to draft non-combatant civilians into a war not the physical body but the mental plane is where battle must take place; the war occurs within the mind. As Laswell (1938) says, “Propaganda is the war of ideas on ideas” (p. 11-12). This war on ideas is not only directed towards the enemy, but towards a state’s own population as well.

Lazarsfeld and Merton

After Laswell two other theorists of importance are Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K.

Merton (1948). Their article “Mass Communication, Social Taste, and Organized Social

Action” contains a section on propaganda. Lazarsfeld and Merton identify three conditions, any or all of which can be satisfied, that make propaganda effective: monopolization, canalization, and supplementation. “Monopolization” refers to the absence of counterpropaganda within the media environment. “Canalization” means that propaganda exploits existing feelings and opinions rather than creating wholly new one ex nihilo. “Supplementation” refers to the use of face-to-face contact to increase the efficacy of propaganda. Lazarsfeld and Merton claim that it was not control of mass media alone that allowed the Nazi regime to control Germany, but the use of organized violence and centers for indoctrination, among other factors, is what was most important.

Chomsky and Herman’s Propaganda Model

Chomsky and Herman’s (2002) Manufacturing Consent is a landmark work in the study of propaganda. The book caused a great deal of controversy when it was released and largely left out of the discussion of media studies by most academics and specialists. Rather than focusing on psychological effects, like Lasswell did, Chomsky and Herman analyze the structure of the mass media, specifically news and journalism, in the United States. Their claim is that the structure of the ownership and funding of the major media outlets conditions the kind of reporting and analysis they produce, and what they do produce will invariably be reporting that justifies and perpetuates the status quo. Propaganda is thus a function of the media apparatus, a function that serves to protect elite interests.

The propaganda model posits that news is conditioned through five filters:

1. The ownership and profit motive of the media;

2. Advertising sources;

3. Official sources and “experts” are drawn from the same milieu as those who

control the media and the state;

4. “Flak”; which is a negative reaction to aberrant opinions or reporting;

5. Anti-communist ideology.

Although their model has been criticized as a type of “conspiracy theory” this criticism misrepresents the argument. Chomsky and Herman do not argue that cabals of

individuals in the upper echelons of media conglomerates and government collude in secret to produce particular programs with a particular ideological bent for the purpose of deceiving the populace. Rather, they analyze the media apparatus in the United

States as a system of disciplining behavior; the filters are constraints that condition, rather than determine, the output of the media. One of the ways that the media do this is by controlling the boundaries of what is acceptable debate. By framing the discussion of important topics in narrow terms certain alternatives are excluded from even being thought about, let alone discussed; therefore, no direct censorship is necessary.

Although the propaganda model is not a theory of media effects or audience reception the title of the work in which it appears, Manufacturing Consent, is instructive.

The phrase is borrowed from the work of the early 20th century American intellectual

Walter Lippmann who used it to refer to the use of the control of information to modify, or manufacture, public opinion.

Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul’s (1965) theory of propaganda, introduced and developed in his work Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, is quite different from the others mentioned described above, although it does have some points of intersection with them. Ellul mentions, for example, the psychological effects of propaganda discussed by and Lazarsfeld and Merton (1948), and Lasswell (1938). But Ellul’s concept of propaganda is much broader and generalized than that of any of the theorists mentioned above. This leads Ellul to sometimes seem to contradict himself, and some

of his insights are sometimes not clearly defined. For example, it is difficult to clearly delineate between Ellul’s definitions of propaganda and ideology.

The broadness of Ellul’s theory of propaganda is more readily accessible from the original French title of his book, Propagandes. The French title is plural and therefore demonstrates that Ellul had multiple types of propaganda in mind. But, in

English, we have no plural for the word propaganda and the French title can only be rendered in the singular, unfortunately giving the impression that Ellul sought to deal with some single, overarching theory of “Propaganda”. Ellul deals with propaganda “in the broadest sense” and his definition includes various aspects, such as: psychological action, psychological warfare, re-education and brainwashing, and public and human relations (Ellul, 1965, p. xviii). He states that propaganda in the broad sense includes all of these characteristics but that propaganda in the narrow sense “is characterized by an institutional quality”.

For Ellul, propaganda is a totalizing force that permeates advanced, industrialized societies. It is a type of governmental technique used by the State —and non-state entities, we should add—and it is an “indispensable condition for the development of technical progress and the establishment of a technological civilization”

(Ellul, 1965, p. x). He believed that previous theorists of propaganda had erred by studying propaganda in isolation, or merely as a collection of gimmicks or tricks. Ellul emphasized that “the study of propaganda must be conducted within the context of the technological society,” because, “Propaganda is a good deal less the political weapon of a regime...than the effect of a technological society that embraces the entire man and tends to be a completely integrated society” (Ellul, 1965, p. xvii).

Ellul mentions some of the definitions of propaganda given by theorists such as

Laswell, Marbury B. Ogle, John Albig, Antonio Miotto, and Leonard W. Doob but demurs

to give his own definition of propaganda until the sixty-first page of his work:

“Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization” (Ellul, 1965, p. 61).

In contrast to the psychological focus of propaganda scholars like Lasswell

(1938), Ellul argued that the real purpose of propaganda was not to change the minds of the target population, but to induce them to action. Whereas Lasswell compared military drills for the purpose of the regimentation of the bodies of soldiers to the use of propaganda for the regimentation of the minds and opinions of civilians, Ellul believed that propaganda is used for the regimentation of civilian bodies as well.

Ellul categorizes propaganda using four contrasting pairs of aspects: political/sociological, agitation/integration, vertical/horizontal, and rational/irrational.

Political propaganda consists of techniques used by government or parties to change public behavior whereas sociological propaganda is “the penetration of an ideology by means of its social context” (Ellul, 1965, p. 63). Sociological propaganda does not rely on slogans or direct appeals but affects individuals through political structures and general culture; “Such propaganda is essentially diffuse...it is based on a general climate, an atmosphere that influences people imperceptibly without having the appearance of propaganda” (Ellul, 1965, p. 63). Ellul says that the purpose of sociological propaganda is to integrate and unify the maximum number of people into a

society and also to spread the style of life of a particular society abroad. Whereas propaganda as traditionally understood is the dispersion of an ideology or message throughout a society, sociological propaganda works in reverse

The existing economic, political, and sociological factors progressively allow an

ideology to penetrate individuals or masses. Through the medium of economic

and political structures a certain ideology is established, which leads to the active

participation of the masses and the adaptation of individuals (Ellul, 1968, p. 64)

Sociological propaganda is not created deliberately but is expressed in many forms such as advertising, movies, technology in general, and education, which work together to produce a general conception of society. The way Ellul describes sociological propaganda implies a kind of totalitarian quality and he includes many things as sociological propaganda that most theorists would not. For example, he gives the example of a film producer who, while not intending to create propaganda, does so anyway by virtue of the way the “American way of life” permeates him and he transmits its values through the film. This is one of the most insightful and vital aspects of his theory of propaganda.

Agitation propaganda is what comes to mind when most people think of propaganda. The distinction between “agitation” and “propaganda” can be traced back to the Soviet Union. Agitation referred to propagandistic activity meant to mobilize the people for some explicit goal. The propaganda of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union are good examples of agitation propaganda. Agitation is conspicuous, highly visible, and meant to have proximate efficacy. Integration propaganda, however, “aims at stabilizing the social body, at unifying and reinforcing it” (Ellul, 1965, p. 75). Whereas agitation is

used to excite a population, integration propaganda is used to calm it and to maintain the present state of society. Ellul said that the most important use of integration propaganda was in the United States.

Vertical propaganda is also propaganda as is traditionally thought; it is propaganda that is created by a leader or some type of authority and is disseminated top-down throughout society. Horizontal propaganda comes from inside a group and the leader and producer of propaganda are not known. Ellul says that this propaganda happens in small groups in which all members have the same social standing.

Rational propaganda breaks the convention of what is normally considered propaganda. It consists of facts, “knowledge”, information, statistics, and data. Rational propaganda is different from irrational propaganda, which consists of appeals to emotion, and Ellul says that irrational propaganda is disappearing: “the more

[technological] progress we make, the more propaganda becomes rational and the more it is based on serious arguments, on dissemination of knowledge, on factual information, figures, and statistics” (Ellul, 1965, p. 85). This observation is contrary to the now-accepted, simple-minded, misconception of propaganda as pure falsehood, and is quite prescient in light of the contemporary political climate in the United States in which frequent appeals to quantitative data and “fact-checking” to settle political debates has become the norm. Irrational propaganda, is of course a commonly understood aspect of propaganda and such propaganda has by no means disappeared, but Ellul’s insight is that in a highly technologically developed society such propaganda is less effective than data and “facts”, or, rather, information that is perceived to be factual, in part owing to its quantitative nature. This may be a result of the increasing

authority science gains as a society becomes industrial, and eventually, post-industrial.

As traditional sources of authority such as the church or the community give ground to science and technology, people learn to take the “language” of science and technology as authoritative, whether they actually understand that language or not.

“Pre-Propaganda”

Ellul (1968) says that pre-propaganda—or as he also calls it, “sub-propaganda” is a necessary condition for all successful propaganda. He contrasts pre-propaganda with active propaganda. Ellul argues that propaganda is “continuous and permanent” in nature and this permanence characterizes pre-propaganda. Ellul explains that

Pre-propaganda does not have a precise ideological objective; it has nothing to

do with an opinion, an idea, a doctrine. It proceeds by psychological

manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or

stereotypes useful when the time comes. It must be continuous, slow,

imperceptible. Man must be penetrated in order to shape such tendencies. He

must be made to live in a certain psychological climate (p. 31)

Whereas active propaganda is intense and occurs during crises, pre-propaganda occurs before such intense propaganda by mobilizing individuals, “in order to thrust them into action at the appropriate moment” (p. 30). This mobilization is the period of pre-propaganda, and is necessary because, “we cannot simply throw a man into action without any preparation, without having mobilized him psychologically and made him responsive not to mention physically ready” (p. 30). Thus, Ellul describes pre-

propaganda, this mobilization, as a period of priming the individual, in order to make him

both psychologically, and even physically, ready to receive active propaganda and then

to act. Ellul posits the concept of pre-propaganda as a way to explain the ability of

propaganda to incite people to act. He calls the actions elicited by propaganda “reflex

actions” and says that they are achieved by short-circuiting the intellectual process.

Ellul’s description of pre-propaganda make clear that he does not think that propaganda wholly consists of explicit statements or arguments. Rather, propaganda is a continuous process of creating the proper environment in which propaganda messages will be received and interpreted by a population in the desired way.

In Ellul’s schema, pre-propaganda is akin to forming a culture, or at least, a cultural “climate”; a certain worldview with mental biases. This is why he states that pre-

propaganda does not have a precise ideological objective and is not related to doctrine.

Ideology and doctrine possess, at least in the sense of an “orthodoxy” or body of

teaching, explicit and distinct concepts that can be analyzed rationally. Pre-propaganda,

however, seems to produce a general orientation towards certain things. To facilitate

this development of this orientation, Ellul says that propagandists create myths, which

he defines as

[an] all-encompassing, activating image: a sort of vision of desirable objectives

that have lost their material, practical character and have become strongly

colored, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and which displace from the

conscious all that is not related to it (Ellul, 1965, p. 31).

Ellul claims that the creating of such myths are powerful enough to take complete

possession of a person’s life, but that this stage is “only created by slow, patient work by

all the methods of propaganda, not by any immediate propaganda operation” (Ellul,

1965, p. 32).

The distinction between sociological propaganda and pre-propaganda (sub-

propaganda) is vague, since, while Ellul says that sociological propaganda “is not

merely preliminary sub-propaganda”, he also says that, “[sometimes] sociological

propaganda will appear to be the medium that has prepared the ground for direct

propaganda; it becomes identified with sub-propaganda” (Ellul, 1968, p. 66). It may be

that Ellul’s concept of pre-propaganda was more influenced by the way that propaganda

operated in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, following a pattern of mobilization-

agitation/propaganda-action. In this pattern, pre-propaganda maps roughly onto the

“mobilization” stage. His concept of sociological propaganda, however, is much more expansive. It illustrates how all aspects of a society, from its technology, to its media and its public institutions combine to produce certain values and orientations to the world that make people in the society susceptible to certain kinds of overt propagandistic actions. In this way it anticipates the argument of this essay that

propaganda is a type of technology used to integrate, unify, stabilize, and govern

populations in a technologically advanced society.

“Orthopraxy”

Ellul breaks with previous theorists who concentrated on how propaganda works

to change the belief system or ideology of individuals. He says that this was true of

older propaganda in the 19th century but is no longer true of the new propaganda. He introduces the concept of “orthopraxy” to explain the way propaganda works today:

if the classic but outmoded view of propaganda consists in defining it as an

adherence of man to an orthodoxy, true modern propaganda seeks, on the

contrary, to obtain an orthopraxy—an action that in itself, and not because of the

value judgments of the person who is acting, leads directly to a goal, which for

the individual is not a conscious and intentional objective to be attained, but

which is considered such by the propagandist. The propagandist knows what

objective should be sought and what action should be accomplished, and he

maneuvers the instrument that will secure precisely this action (p. 27)

Modern propaganda operates to create “orthopraxy”, or the readiness to participate in activity unreflectively. In order to achieve orthopraxy a change in the deeply held beliefs of the individual is not necessary. As a result, a person may participate in actions with which he disagrees in light of his own ideology. Ellul says that participation need not be active but can also be passive when a person supports or encourages an activity. He uses the example of fans at a sports game. Even though they do not actually participate in the playing of the game their cheers of encouragement are a form of participation.

Orthopraxy is one of Ellul’s most intriguing concepts and the move toward orthopraxy is important for understanding both the vision of propaganda offered here and the KONY

2012 phenomenon.

Of all the theorists discussed above, Ellul is the one whose ideas most closely resemble the arguments put forth in the present essay. Ellul’s understanding of propaganda is broad and subtle, and while he studied the leading propaganda theorists

of his day, his own ideas push forward into the future and reveal aspects and developments in propaganda that were far ahead of their time. As such, his work provides one of the major theoretical pillars upon which the argument in the present essay shall be built.

The Epistemic Merit Model

Sheryl Tuttle Ross (2002), in the article, “Understanding Propaganda: The

Epistemic Merit Model and Its Application to Art”, offers a model for characterizing propaganda that she argues is more effective than simply labelling all propaganda as untruths. She reproduces several definitions of propaganda, including this one from

Harold Lasswell’s Institute for Propaganda Analysis: "Propaganda is an expression of opinion or action by individuals or groups deliberately designed to influence the opinions and actions of other individuals or groups with reference to a predetermined end” (p.

17). Ross introduces the concept of “epistemic merit” as a way to characterize the particularity of propaganda. For Ross, something is “epistemically defective” if

Either it is false, inappropriate, or connected to other beliefs in ways that are

inapt, misleading, or unwarranted. False statements, bad arguments, immoral

commands as well as inapt metaphors (and other literary tropes) are the sorts of

things that are epistemically defective (p. 23)

Ross’ model outlines four criteria for classifying a message as propaganda: 1) the message itself is “epistemically defective”, 2) the sender has an intent to persuade,

3) the population or group at whom the message is targeted is somehow politically

significant, and 4) that the sender is an organization or institution working on behalf of a

political cause. Ross’ model seeks to account for the pejorative sense that is associated

with propaganda and therefore focuses on the quality of the message.

Specifically, Ross (2002) asserts that what defines the quality of a propagandistic

message is not the fact that it is false but the fact that it is what she calls “epistemically

defective”. Epistemic defectiveness is different than outright lies and Ross designates

“false statements, bad arguments, immoral commands as well as inapt metaphors (and

other literary tropes)” as the types of things that are “epistemically defective” (p. 23).

Ross believes that focusing of epistemic defectiveness rather than the truth of a

message helps in categorizing propaganda because it accounts for the role of context in

and because much propaganda, such as commands, do not directly address truth-

values.

Ross’s concept of epistemic defectiveness is important because it is a clear and

logical explanation of why the traditional view of propaganda as lies is inadequate.

Propaganda is communication that is meant to be persuasive. Persuasion can be

effected in many ways, and truth-claims and logical syllogisms are just two ways that this happens. Ross realizes that persuasion can, and maybe mostly, happens by means of other types of statements and arguments, most of which may be lacking in terms of logical validity or may rely solely on logical/rhetorical fallacies. Her definition also allows for the consideration as propaganda of various types of communication, such as art, since arguments can be made visually as well, and these arguments can also be epistemically defective by her definition. Her ideas are important for the present essay since the subject of this essay, The KONY 2012 viral video, was effective and popular in

large part because of its moving imagery, and the argument transmitted through that imagery. The video also makes an argument that cannot be easily analyzed by the rules of logical argumentation, but which may qualify for what Ross calls epistemic defectiveness.

New Working Definition of Propaganda

All of the above definitions of propaganda give us useful insights for how we can understand propaganda in a 21st century, online, social-media-saturated context. Pope

Gregory XV’s foundational statement shows that propaganda has not always been a negative activity—except in the hands of one’s ideological opponents. Lasswell’s focus on the psychology propaganda as an instrument of policy is also instructive. Chomsky and Herman give a much broader concept of propaganda as a function of the mass- media apparatus that limits the range of discussable and conceivable topics and protects the status quo. Ellul’s rich and innovative theory of propaganda combines all of these but also adds a detailed typology of different types of propaganda and key concepts such as orthopraxy or propaganda’s ability to incite individuals to unthinking action. Tuttle-Ross’ concept of epistemic merit further emphasizes the idea that most propaganda is not analyzable for explicit truth values but argues instead that the logic of propaganda is usually inapt or otherwise faulty. Tuttle-Ross’ analysis also stipulates that propaganda must be used against some politically significant target population towards tangible political goals. This aspect of her theory is compatible with Ellul’s concept of orthopraxy and propaganda’s move from ideology towards inciting action.

In light of the insights of these theorists it is possible to come up with a definition

of propaganda for a new communications technology context that does not rely on value

judgements and does not rely on outmoded understanding of propaganda from the First

and Second World Wars—although, those types of propaganda are still very much in existence. For the purposes of this analysis propaganda shall be defined as a genre of persuasive, rhetorical speech that is used by some actor to achieve a tangible political effect from some target population. Propaganda does not inject completely new ideas into people but builds upon a pre-existing substrate of ideologies, prejudices, and myths that are already present in the target population. The theory of propaganda at use here recognizes that as persuasive speech and action, propaganda must convince its targets

by working on their beliefs and worldviews but retains Ellul’s concept of orthopraxy as

the goal of propaganda today. Here, propaganda overlaps with marketing and

advertising since, for the advertiser, it is not enough for the target to change his opinion

about a product; he must act on his new feelings about the product by purchasing or

subscribing. So too, the contemporary propagandist strives toward eliciting a desired

action in the target.

One area where the present theory diverges from the above theorists—except

Chomsky and Herman—is the focus on states as the major producers of propaganda. It is true that in the past states were the chief producers of propaganda, but this is no longer the case. Private entities, whether corporations, NGOs, and pressure-groups

now make a great deal of propaganda aimed at affecting some kind of political change.

The example of the NGO Invisible Children and their KONY 2012 is a perfect example

of this.

CHAPTER 2: DEWEY AND LIPPMANN: PROPAGANDA AS A TECHNOLOGY OF

GOVERNANCE AND THE PLACE OF EDUCATION

John Dewey’s book, The Public and its Problems (1927), is a direct response and attempt to deal with the ideas of put forth by Walter Lippmann in his own books

Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925). Dewey’s response to

Lippmann’s ideas has been characterized as a “debate” or a “dialogue” however

Lippmann never publically engaged with Dewey either in an oral discussion or even a direct written response to The Public and its Problems. The “debate” has come to be understood as a conflict between democratic ideals, represented by Dewey, and elitist technocracy, represented by Lippmann. However, the interpretation of Dewey’s response to Lippmann as a “debate” is mostly a creation of later scholars, in particular communication studies scholar James Carey (Schudson, 2008). Dewey actually read and favorably reviewed Lippmann’s books and he said of Public Opinion that it was

“perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned” (Dewey, 1922, p. 337).

Although the idea of a “debate” is a creation of later scholars, and despite

Dewey’s admiration of Lippmann, Dewey did disagree with Lippmann on some very important concepts. Lippmann, a liberal, was concerned about the state of America’s democracy and anxious about its viability in the chaotic and distracting environment of

20th century industrial society. This anxiety and disappointment was in large part a result of his experiences working within government during the First World War.

In Public Opinion, and, The Phantom Public, he develops a vision of democracy in which a class of “experts” study society and deliver information and insights directly to the administrative/managerial class, who then go on to make decisions based on that information. Lippmann reserves a role for the public only during occasional elections in which would vote in favor or against proposed policies or particular politicians.

Lippmann developed this schematic as a result of his lack of faith in the ability of any one person to achieve “omnicompetence”; the ability to completely know and understand any issue. He wrote that we are all “outsiders” to most issues and therefore form imperfect “pictures” of the various problems and issues facing society. In light of this understanding of society, Lippmann thought it best that experts who had the time to fully examine issues inform administrators.

Dewey, although agreeing with many of Lippmann’s concerns, disagreed with a democratic structure in which experts passed information directly to administrators and the action of the public was minimized. Dewey’s opinions on this matter are a direct outgrowth of his theories of knowledge. Dewey rejected the view of knowledge and inquiry as the product and activity of an isolated, insular subject; he believed all knowledge to be social. Even when people make new discoveries they are building on a stock of social knowledge that is accumulated within a society, culture, or group.

Therefore, the question of “omnicompetence” loses its importance. The question for

Dewey is not whether individual citizens en masse can gain the requisite knowledge in order to make informed decisions, but how can society and its constituent groups be informed in such a way that a store of knowledge is built up from which individuals can

draw when making decisions. Dewey’s metaphor is primarily auditory, conversation- based, while Lippmann’s is visual, based on privately-held images within the mind.

In Dewey’s answer to Lippmann’s anxieties, journalism has a special part to play in keeping the populace informed of important issues. Dewey envisions a press that does not report the “news” are a series of “facts” but one that communicates information in such a way as to help foster in the public a certain orientation or attitude towards problems. In this way the function of the press would be essentially educative, in the democratic sense of the word “education” the way that Dewey used it.

I would argue that this conception of the role of journalism is not necessarily democratic. There are ways in which a particular orientation toward particular issues can be fostered within the populace that actually contradict and work against the

Deweyan conception of democracy. The function of propaganda, public relations, advertising, and marketing is also to create within the populace certain ways of thinking and certain orientations towards issues. The traditional notions of the difference between propaganda and education is that propaganda teaches people what to think while education teaches people how to think (Taylor, 1995). It is true that the early propaganda used by the United States and Great Britain during the First World War concentrated on transmitting very specific notions about German evil. However, as propaganda and public relations became more sophisticated those attempting to sway popular opinion started to create climates of opinion and to foster worldviews which were harmonious to their aims. In fact, even the very basic transmission of specific ideas or “facts” eventually creates such changes in how people think. In much the same way that Dewey understood knowledge and inquiry to be social phenomena, allowing

individuals to draw upon a socially created stock of knowledge, the injection of bits of information into that stock of social knowledge will eventually lead to individuals having certain orientations and attitudes towards issues that are amenable to the aims of those who originally injected the information.

The issue of propaganda is important here because of the background of

Lippmann and his effects on the intellectual climate of the early 20th century. Lippmann advocated US entry into the First World War and participated in efforts to propagandize

German soldiers during the war and he also participated in The Inquiry, a group formed by President Wilson to draw up plans for peace negotiations following the war.

Lippmann intended that his propaganda work in the war would not be deceitful but would be,

Getting away from propaganda in the sinister sense, and substituting it for a frank

campaign of education addressed to the German and Austrian troops, explaining

as simply as persuasively as possible the unselfish character of the war, the

generosity of our aims, and the great hope of mankind which we are trying to

realize. (Steel, 1999, p.138)

Though the precise details are unclear, some think that Lippmann was also a member of the Committee on Public Information—also called the Creel Committee— during the war (Chomsky, 2014; Arndt, 2006), while others claim he was never a member (Jansen, 2008), or, was even antagonistic to the committee (Sproule, 1977;

Blumenthal, 2007).

Before the US entered the war on the side of the Allies, its citizens were targeted by the propaganda of both Great Britain and Germany (Taylor, 2003). At the time of the

war, most Americans were isolationist, and had no interest in becoming involved in the war in Europe. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson won the presidency largely on his promises to keep the United States out of the war. The Committee was also responsible for propaganda activities in Europe (Steel, 1999). The Germans first attempted to target the

American public through German-American social clubs or “bunds”, but as Taylor

(1995) explains, that strategy was “counter-productive” and the British learned from the

German attempts that the best way to wage the “campaign against American neutrality” was to appeal to key individuals who could influence others, rather than attempting a

“direct appeal to the mass of population” (pp. 177-178).

The British set up a secret war propaganda bureau at Wellington House

(Sanders, 1975, Taylor, 1999). Wellington House was “the single most important branch of the British propaganda organization between 1914 and 1917 and its work was so secret that even most members of parliament were unaware of it” and the “massive bulk of paper materials [Americans] were receiving from Britain about the war” came from the organization (Taylor, 1995, p. 177). Wellington House took advantage of German actions like the sinking of the Lusitania and the Zimmerman Telegram to propagandize

American citizens for the British cause. Upon the US entry into the war the American government began to set up its own propaganda apparatus which included a body called the Committee on Public Information (CPI), commonly referred to as the “Creel

Committee” because it was under the direction of the journalist George Creel (Creel,

1920).

The Committee on Public Information was a group of American intellectuals and officials who worked to produce information, or propaganda, targeted at the citizens of

the United States. The CPI “operated in full view of the public” and was staffed by

“liberal, reform-minded intellectual authors who often seemed more determined to reaffirm the ideals of the American Republic than to combat Prussian militarism” (Taylor,

1995, p. 183-184). The CPI was divided into two sections, one foreign and the other domestic, and the foreign division was subdivided further into a press bureau, cable services and a foreign film service. The CPI even directed its activities toward schools publishing The National School Service, “a sixteen-page semi-monthly periodical going free of charge to every public-school teacher in the United States about 600,-000 [sic] in all” (Creel, 1920, p. 111). Creel and the committee realized that “the national morale would need the support of a message that went without fail into every home” and that,

“For this purpose there was no other agency so effective, so sure, as the public schools with their twenty millions of pupils” (Creel, 1920, p. 111).

One confirmed member of the committee was Edward Bernays. Bernays has been called “the Father of Public Relations” for his work in repurposing the insights he gained from his experience from his time in the committee to work within the world of corporate capitalism. Bernays drew legitimacy for his new public relations techniques by claiming to be directly influenced by the ideas of Lippmann, although there is much evidence to show that such a relationship is spurious and that Bernays merely used

Lippmann’s fame and popularity as a means to boost his own, in a move that can be termed “PR for PR” (Jansen, 2013).

Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and although he had no formal training in psychoanalysis, he certainly had an understanding of human psychology. He also understood the history of propaganda. Bernays’ essay on public

relations, Propaganda, is partly an attempt to make the idea of propaganda and public relations more palatable for a public that had grown weary of the term and practice as a result of the propaganda campaigns of the first World War, many of which Bernays participated in directly. In his introduction to the 2005 edition of Bernays’ Propaganda,

Mark Crispin Miller explains that the rather non-controversial history of the term pre-war;

“Far from denoting lies, half-truths, selective history or any of the other tricks that we associate with ‘propaganda’ now, that word meant, at first, the total opposite of such deceptions” (p. 9).

In effect, for Bernays and others before the war, “propaganda” was akin to education, or rather, was an educational endeavor, an activity undertaken with the goal of informing—and of course persuading—some part of the population about a topic, ideology, political issue, or cause. Bernays (1928) quotes a “recent issue” of Scientific

American—no citation information was given—that explains the origin and “technical” nature of the term:

There is no word in the English language…whose meaning

has been so sadly distorted as the word ‘propaganda.’ The change took

place mainly during the late war when the term took on a decidedly

sinister complexion

If you turn to the Standard Dictionary, you will find that the word was

applied to a congregation or society of cardinals for the care and

oversight of foreign missions which was instituted at Rome in the year

1627. It was applied also to the College of the Propaganda at Rome that

was founded by Pope Urban VIII, for the education of the missionary

priests. Hence, in later years the word came to be applied to any

institution or scheme for propagating a doctrine or system. (p. 49)

Bernays’ ulterior motives notwithstanding, the etymology he references for the term “propaganda” is useful in regaining an understanding of the simultaneously almost innocuous yet deep connotations the word originally held. He also understood that whether propaganda is good or bad depends upon the standpoint of the individual and the quality of the information presented: “I am aware that the word propaganda carries to many minds an unpleasant connotation. Yet whether...propaganda is good or bad depends upon the merit of the cause urged, and the correctness of the information published (Bernays, 1928, p. 48).

Therefore, the role of perception is key. A major factor in determining if propaganda is considered to be negative is the perception people have of the things being propagandized. As Miller states in his introduction, “A campaign to improve public health through vaccination, sanitary cooking or the placement of spittoons was, or is, no less a propaganda drive than any anti-clerical or socialist or nativist crusade” (Bernays,

1928, p. 11). These days information campaigns in favor of causes that are perceived as positive or helpful would not be termed “propaganda” but simply as being educational or informative and therefore “neutral”.

The importance of the necessity of creating messages that appear “neutral” and therefore “unbiased” and “factual” was evident during to war to men like Creel (1920), who did not refer to his own efforts as propaganda but framed them as an educational or informational endeavor: “Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for

we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than

the simple, straightforward presentation of facts” (p. 3).

In fact, it was this distancing and refusal to use the word propaganda on the part

of the Allies that reveals part of the reason why the word gained such a negative connotation. Miller (2005) explains that the Allies purposefully associated the word with

the propaganda efforts the Germans, preferring to maintain the appearance of justified

objectivity for their own side:

In World War One it was the propaganda of our side that first made

‘propaganda’ so opprobrious a term. Fouled by close association with ‘the

Hun,’ the word did not regain its innocence—not even when the Allied

propaganda used to tar ‘the Hun’ had been belatedly exposed to the

American and British people. Indeed, as they learned more and more

about the outright lies, exaggerations and half-truths used on them by their

own governments, both populations came, understandably, to see

‘propaganda’ as a weapon even more perfidious than they had thought

when they had not perceived themselves as its real target” (pp. 14-15)

Ironically, the Allied effort to demonize the propaganda activity of the Germans

had caused the American and British populations to view all propaganda

activities with suspicion, even those of their own governments.

Bernays uses the phrase “manufacture of consent”, which he borrows

from Walter Lippmann, to refer propaganda and says that this type of

manipulation of public opinion has become indispensable in the post-war environment. In Bernays’ (2005) analysis the minds and perceptions of the public

are controlled by hidden elites, although, he does not oppose this state of affairs and even thinks that the wise businessman/statesman should take advantage of the situation

In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of

politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we

are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who

understand the mental processes and social patterns of the

masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind,

who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and

guide the world” (pp. 37-38)

Bernays (2005) refers to this “small number of persons” who control the public mind as an “invisible government” of powerful and influential individuals, politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, intellectuals, and journalists, who are not necessarily connected to or aware of each other. And, he states that “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government” (p. 48). Here, he anticipates Lasswell’s idea of the propaganda as “the antidote to willfulness” and Ellul’s observation that propaganda is a necessary tool of governance in modern, democratic societies with educated, literate populations. Technological changes and changes in education have changed the structure of society and redistributed power, giving the majority of common people to ability to express their will:

But times have changed. The steam engine, the multiple press, and the public

school, that trio of the industrial revolution, have taken the power away from

kings and given it to the people. The people actually gained power which the king

lost (p. 47)

In order for the minority invisible government to effectively manage the “crisis of democracy”, the increasing desire of the masses influence the governance of society, propaganda, “Mold[ing] the mind of the masses [so] that they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction,” has become “inevitable” (Bernays, 2005, p.

47).

In keeping with the concept of the manufacture of consent, Bernays (2005) describes the ability of propaganda to shape public opinion in terms of a mass- produced, industrial product, the rubber stamp

But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber

stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific

data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite

innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of

millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli,

all received identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the

American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion (p. 48)

While his illustration of the power of propaganda to regiment the minds of the masses may be a bit overstated, Bernays presents an analysis of mass education here that is close to criticisms voiced by Jacques Ellul and progressive educators like John Dewey.

Education that merely teaches literacy, giving an individual the ability to access information but not the ability to critically analyze that information, leaves the individual

vulnerable to information that has been crafted for the express purpose of influencing

opinion and action.

Torches of Freedom

Although in Propaganda Bernays was no doubt attempting to sway his own target audience, businessmen and politicians who would potentially seek his services as a shaper of public opinion, and therefore presents a somewhat exaggerated picture of the powers of propaganda, the validity of his arguments was borne out in his actual practice as a public relations specialist. An oft-cited example of Bernays’ ability to

“manufacture consent” or socially engineer opinions and behaviors is his work

promoting the habit of cigarette smoking for women. In the early 20th century the habit of

smoking was considered dirty and was taboo for women, being associated with loose

morality. That began to change during the First World War as women began to take

men’s places in factories and occupations. Many women began to use smoking as a

sign of liberation and the tobacco companies wanted to take advantage of the

opportunity to expand into a new market; as G. W. Hill, president of the American

Tobacco Company, said, “It will be like opening a new gold mine right in our front yard”

(Brandt, 1996, p. 64) . Hill was aggressive in his desire to capture the female market

and sought the aid of Bernays. Bernays helped the tobacco industry to achieve this goal by marketing cigarettes as a weight-loss method and as a healthy alternative to sugar, soliciting medical publications to help bolster his case against sweets (Brandt, 1996).

Hill was concerned that women were mostly smoking in private and wanted to increase the visibility of women smoking in public. As Bernays recalls his conversation with Hill,

Hill called me in. “How can we get women to smoke on the street? They’re

smoking indoors. But damn it, if they spend half the time outdoors and we can

get ‘em to smoke outdoors, we’ll damn near double our female market” (Bernays,

1965, 849)

This initiated what is probably Bernays’ most famous PR stunt. Bernays sought the advice of psychoanalyst A.A. Brill to help him fulfill Hill’s request. According to Bernays

(1965), Brill explained the unconscious psychological significance of smoking for women, “Some women regard cigarettes as symbols of freedom. Smoking is a sublimation of oral eroticism…It is perfectly normal for women to want to smoke cigarettes” (p. 849). Brill also suggested that many women associated cigarettes with men, and therefore they represented “torches of freedom”.

Armed with this knowledge, Bernays engineered an event to associate fashionable, liberated, young women with cigarettes, hiring a group of women to march in the 1929 Easter parade in New York while smoking. This event has become famous as an example of successful social engineering through strategic marketing. Speaking of his experience convincing women to become smokers, Bernays said, “Age old customs, I learned, could be broken down by a dramatic appeal, disseminated by the network of the media” (Amos and Haglund, 2000, p. 4). However, there is much evidence that Bernays significantly exaggerated the success of the “Torches of

Freedom” stunt. By analyzing reports of the event in contemporaneous newspapers

Murphee (2015) has shown that there is little evidence that the event attracted significant media or public attention, and that the reception story of the event’s success is the result of Bernays’ own efforts at “Constantly reframing the event as a history- making example of effortlessly fooling the press and changing society within a few months. The story is not true, but it is certainly a credible rendition” (p. 260). The stunt may have had some great effect on the public, but the record does not give evidence of this. The real public relations success of the event was not its immediate effect on the numbers of women smokers—although, Bernays’ long-term efforts to promote cigarettes were effective—but the way Bernays shaped the collective memory of the event itself.

His exploits in the service of the tobacco industry are just one example of the way that Bernays and his clients attempted to steer the opinions of a group by identifying and using tastemakers and leaders. Although the effectiveness of the

“Torches of Freedom” episode was exaggerated by Bernays, what the totality of his public relations work with the industry demonstrates is not that Bernays and Big

Tobacco simply “duped” women into believing that smoking is good for them, such a conclusion is simplistic and attributes too strong a causal relationship between the industry’s marketing efforts and the spread of the habit of smoking among women, while at the same time overlooking the much more subtle and nuanced ways the industry achieved this goal. Bernays’ operated with a long-term, complex strategy that included tactics such as the “Hiring of celebrity spokeswomen, aligning cigarettes with fashion and slender figures, and convincing hotels and restaurants to include cigarettes on their dessert menus, among others,” and these efforts “contributed to the $32 million

increase in cigarette sales in 1928 alone” (Murphee, 2015, p. 278). His work with the tobacco industry demonstrates how a propagandist like Bernays operates not (usually) by crude direct appeals, but by cultivating a population—remember the agricultural origin of the term “propaganda”—, changing the way individuals in the population view the world, their place in it, and proper behavior in that world.

This activity of cultivating a population is, I would argue, essentially the same kind of activity as what is called “education”, both in the sense of “informing”, and of

“molding” minds and tastes. The dubious quality of Bernays’ information extolling the health benefits of cigarettes notwithstanding, the molding aspect of Bernays’ public relations efforts for the tobacco industry should be readily apparent. In fairness to

Bernays, it should be mentioned that, “Once the toxic side effects of smoking had become impossible to talk away, Bernays not only gave up working for tobacco companies, but became a vocal critic of tobacco” (Miller, 2005, p. 25).

If the objectionable nature of the push by the tobacco lobby to garner new addicts/customers, causes some to balk at labeling such efforts as “educational”, it should be recognized that the same methods can, and have, been used to influence populations to embrace healthy or benign positions and behaviors. The most appropriate example in this case would be the anti-smoking campaigns that persist to this day, with wide exposure on television, internet, and print media. Another example of positive social relations work which pre-dates Bernays is the work of the American

Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) to combat sexually transmitted diseases during the early 20th century. Anderson’s (2017) study of Progressive Era social hygiene groups

found that ASHA employed communication strategies that anticipated Bernays’ own tactics, such as

Segmenting audiences, utilizing events to reach appropriate audiences, using

visual media, and creating house organs to arouse public sentiment, influence

attitudes, and promote desired behavior. The group attempted to engineer public

sentiment years before Bernays started crystalizing public opinion (p. 13)

An understandable resistance to the connection—not equation—of education and propaganda comes from the very real differences in their ends or desired results.

Bernays’ work for the tobacco industry had as its end the increase in the number of smokers; even if smoking were not unhealthy the achievement of this end would have a negligible positive benefit for society. Education and public health campaigns, however, have ends that are intended to bring clear positive benefits to the public, in the form of a more informed and healthy society. However, this distinction misses the point that the connection comes from the methods employed, even if the content and ends are different. The real barrier to recognizing Bernays’ campaigns as a type of educational activity is value judgment. Like propaganda, people have attached negative value to public relations activity and see it as manipulative, and therefore bad. This is understandable, since no one likes to be manipulated, especially to one’s own disadvantage, but viewing propaganda or education neutrally allows for a clear analysis of how both work on society, without ideological barriers.

One important aspect is the use of social groups and opinion-makers within those groups as starting points to disseminate new ideas and behaviors. With his

“torches of freedom” campaign Bernays and the tobacco industry were able to in a way

“hijack” or “co-opt nascent movements for women’s liberation and succeed in overturning conservative social norms. If the circumstances were different this achievement might even be described as “liberal”. This observation will become important later in chapter 5 when the use of branded and commodified politically radical iconography in order to generate mass political movements is discussed.

KONY 2012 and Subject Formation

The above underlines the argument that propaganda is not equal to falsification.

Appealing to a desire for liberation or a desire to be considered a trendsetter may be disingenuous, it may be manipulative, but it is not the same as lying. What Bernays did was to transform the way people thought and behaved in relation to women smoking.

Although greatly influenced by Lippmann Bernays did disagree with him on a few key points concerning propaganda. One point of difference was that, according to Bernays,

Lippmann argued that propaganda is dependent upon censorship. Bernays (1923) claimed that the opposite is true; He defined propaganda as a “purposeful, directed effort to overcome censorship—the censorship of the group mind and the herd reaction”

(p. 122). Bernays meant by this that prejudices instilled by culture and custom had to be overcome in order to introduce some new behavior or opinion into the public, and that this is the true work of propaganda. He argued that “the average citizen is the world's most efficient censor” and that a person’s "‘logic proof compartments,’ his own absolutism are the obstacles which prevent him from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction” (p. 122).

Bernays sought to shape information, not to hide it. His understanding of the role of propaganda and the propagandists was quite sophisticated. His model of communication was not unidirectional, from source to receiver, but an interaction of forces between the public and those that sought to affect it: “Action and interaction are continually going on in between the forces projected out to the public and the public itself. The public relations counsel must understand this fact in its broadest and most detailed implications” (Bernays, 1923, p. 77). In other words, for Bernays “…public opinion was precisely a spot of contestation and struggle formed by the interaction of relations of force. Public opinion was the domain formed by the struggle between the public and a variety of agencies to constitute each other and each other’s conduct according to their own agenda” (Wimberly, 2017, p. 109).

The goal of the propagandist is to govern this “spot of contestation” and to change the way people viewed themselves and the world. Bernays and his colleagues wanted to “…transform subjects and their conduct. His propaganda aimed to be not just a film of falsehood that was laid over the truth but a transformation of who we are and how we comport ourselves” (Wimberly, 2017, p. 108).

This deeper understanding of what propaganda is helps us to understand why

KONY 2012 can be viewed as a propaganda campaign and why it was so successful.

The information about Uganda contained in the video was, while not completely false, very faulty and a misrepresentation of the situation in Uganda. But the point goal of the video and the reason it was so effective is that it motivated its target audience. The video made them see themselves not simply as passive spectators watching a tragedy but as powerful agents of good who could change the situation if they tried. Invisible

Children wanted to empower young people to “do more than just watch”, but to “take steps towards ending injustice” (Karlin and Matthew, 2012, p. 257). This subject formation was aided by Invisible Children’s skillful and savvy use of marketing and branding. The bracelets, t-shirts and other branded products sold by Invisible Children allowed its young targets to “wear their involvement” and facilitated “identity formation”

(Karlin & Matthew, 2012, p. 258).

The campaign also sought to “partition” the audience. Invisible Children made extensive use of surveys and polls and gained a good understanding of their constituents. According to Karlin and Matthew (2012), the survey results indicated that over eighty-eight percent of their supporters were under the age of twenty-six. The campaign performed bi-annual tours that focused heavily on schools. During the tours the organization would screen its films and around half of those screenings were presented to school groups. The organization intentionally targeted celebrities and famous musicians who were popular with youth, they even created a band relations department and coordinated their campaign with the touring, album release, and video release schedule of famous bands.

Obviously Invisible Children had mastered many of the techniques men like

Bernays pioneered. For example, Bernays (1923) explains how a public relations counsel careful segmented the possible audience for the Russian Ballet at the

Metropolitan Opera House, making a different type of appeal to each segment depending on their tastes and identities. Areas of overlap between different demographics were identified in order to maximize the number viewers reached. He also discusses how a company that produced silk increased its market size by targeting

women, who composed the largest potential market, and by marketing the product

differently to different segments of women:

Thus, to the members of women's clubs, silk was projected as the

embodiment of fashion. To those women who visited museums, silk was

displayed there as art. To the schools in the same town, perhaps, silk

became a lesson in the natural history of the silkworm. To art clubs, silk

became color and design… Each group of women was appealed to on the

basis of its greatest interest” (p. 145-146)

Likewise, Invisible Children performed extensive market research to discover the

characteristics of population segments amongst whom they would have the greatest

appeal. After learning this they created an extensive campaign tailored to the interests

of this demographic.

Dewey’s Reply to Lippmann and the Place of Education

Although he never faced Lippmann in a public debate John Dewey did respond

to his arguments contained in Public Opinion. Dewey wrote an article for The New

Republic, entitled Education as Politics, which was published on October 4, 1922. In

response to Lippmann’s criticisms of democracy and the near-impossibility of its actual

practice Dewey calls for educational reform. He criticizes the education of his day as

backward and inappropriate for the changing social situation of an industrialized

America, declaring that:

Our schooling does not educate, if by education be meant a trained habit

of discriminating inquiry and discriminating belief, the ability to look

beneath a floating surface to detect the conditions that fix the contour of

the surface, and the forces which create its waves and drifts. We dupe

ourselves and others because we have not that inward protection against

sensation, excitement, credulity and conventionally stereotyped opinion

which is found only in a trained mind (Dewey, 1922, p. 140)

Dewey identifies two major failing in the education of his day. First, education was burdened with the “persistence, in the body of what is taught, of traditional material which is irrelevant to present conditions” which resulted in a public which had “no protection against being duped in facing the emergencies of today” (p.

140). Dewey claimed that even specialists in a field were as susceptible to “bunk” as an uneducated layperson since the education of the day was so inadequate in the face of modern challenges; he said that the schools of the day graduated men who were “clothed in the chain-armor of antiquity” who were proud of their awkward movements in the modern world (p. 140).

The second major failure of education Dewey identified as the failure to teach critical thinking skills. He locates the origin of this “avoidance of the spirit of criticism” in the belief that the avoidance of teaching students to be critical of their nations and their nations’ history would produce better citizens. The avoidance of addressing social ills resulted in students who had a condition of what he called

“artificial innocence”.

Dewey (1922) concludes that a solution is almost hopeless but indicates that the only solution would be greater confidence in intelligence and the scientific method. Dewey’s solution seems nigh-unobtainable and would entail a radical restructuring of democratic society. He says that education, as he defines it, is the answer and that “education means the creation of a discriminating mind, a mind that prefers not to dupe itself or to be the dupe of others” (p. 141).

Furthermore, he argues that educators, and presumably all citizens, “will have to cultivate the habit of suspended judgment, of skepticism [sic], of desire for evidence, of appeal to observation rather than sentiment, discussion rather than bias. Inquiry rather than conventional Idealizations” (p. 141). He ends the article by stating that when education has achieved this then education and politics will become the same thing and leaves a glimpse of an idea that would combat the work of propagandists. He says that when education and politics become “one and the same thing” then politics will become the “intelligent management of social affairs”. This presents a vision of a critical education-for-democracy, or politics as a pedagogical project, as the technological antithesis of propaganda as a technology of governance. Since, whereas the propagandist shapes information to manipulate irrational desires and drives, education as government would eschew appeals to emotion and reified traditional prejudices and be a scientific process of constant testing and observation without a search for conclusive solutions.

Dewey’s solution is quite radical and attractive, but problems may be caused by his understanding of propaganda. While Dewey astutely notices that

modern society necessitates the utilization as a technology of governance, saying that:

The bulk and the careful organization of propaganda are testimony to two

outstanding facts: the new necessity governments are under of enlisting

popular interest and sentiment; and the possibility of exciting and directing

that interest by a judiciously selected supply of ‘news’” (Dewey, 1922, p.

139)

But, he then understates propaganda’s importance in relation to other factors, such as entrenched prejudices, stereotypes, and lazy thinking, saying that these are much more damaging to the public mind that propaganda. In Dewey’s day this may have been correct, but the media apparatuses of Dewey’s time had nowhere near the ability to reach audiences that today’s media possess.

Compared with twenty-four-hour cable news, ubiquitous social media with constantly updated live feeds accessed by mobile devices, the effect of prejudices and “mental habits” caused by bad education are either dwarfed or drastically amplified. If examined, the time most people spend in formal education would be much less than the time they spend watching television, listening to the radio, or accessing bits information, rumor, and images from social media. In such an environment the power of clever marketers and propagandists is amplified exponentially, especially if they are as savvy and thorough in targeting susceptible populations as an organization like Invisible

Children.

CHAPTER 3: ANALYZING KONY 2012: AUGMENTING STUART HALL’S EN/DE-

CODING MODEL WITH A MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODL AND LOTMAN’S

SEMIOSPHERE

In the truly insightful essay, Encoding, Decoding, Stuart Hall (2006) brilliantly analyses key aspects of language, images, and media such as television and then proposes a system for classifying and explaining the differing ways that audiences/ message recipients can “decode”, or yield meaningful, messages. Hall’s analysis of message transmission can apply to any semiotic activity broadly speaking, but in the essay itself it is clear that when speaking of mass communications institutions his analysis was formulated with broadcast mass media--especially television--in mind.

Most previous communication models posited three stages/entities in the communication act; sender-message/transmission-receiver but Hall’s model consists of four “moments” or stages: production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction. Hall proposes that instead of viewing communication as a linear process

with only three elements, it might be better to conceive of communication in terms of

“...a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive

moments…” and further, “...as a 'complex structure in dominance', sustained through

the articulation of connected practices, each of which, however, retains its

distinctiveness and has its own specific modality, its own forms and conditions of

existence” (Hall, 2006, p. 163). In contrast to the linear, three-step model, Hall’s

conceptualization of communication recognizes each moment in the process as a

process and structure all its own, although in complex interaction with the other moments.

Since in Hall’s construction each stage is a process in itself, the other steps can become material for the production process themselves; “circulation and reception are...'moments' of the production process in television and are reincorporated...into the production process itself. The consumption or reception of the television message is thus also itself a 'moment' of the production process in its larger sense…” (Hall, 2006, p.

165). This insight recognizes that the production of media and mass communication happens within a society, within a culture (the media of a society will no doubt be a reflection and outgrowth of the culture of that society, drawing on language, shared concepts, and shared history) filled with individuals who receive and interpret the messages being broadcast. The reactions and responses of these individuals are a part of the production of yet more media. However, the production and the reception stages are not identical although they are deeply related; they are “...differentiated moments within the totality formed by the social relations…” differing in terms of process and the structure of the institutions that constitute these stages.

Following Barthes (1977[1980]), Hall makes a distinction between two levels of linguistic meaning; denotation and connotation. Denotation is “widely equated with the literal meaning of the sign…” and connotation refers to “...less fixed and therefore more conventionalized and changeable, associative meanings, which clearly vary from instance to instance and therefore must depend on the on the intervention of codes”

(Hall, 2006, p. 168). The denotation of a word can be said to be its “dictionary” definition, whereas the connotative meaning of a word can be said to be the various

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“senses” or glosses it takes due to different cultural and historical processes. However,

Hall does not use this classic distinction and instead opts for a purely analytic one

saying that there are few times in any discourse when signs have only a

denotative/literal meaning and that “in actual discourse most signs will combine both the

denotative and the connotative aspects” so that the two terms are “merely useful

analytic tools for distinguishing...between…. the different levels at which ideologies and

discourses intersect” (Hall, 2006, p. 168). Hall believes that misunderstands can occur

at the denotative level, but for his television and other mass media analysis he concentrates on the connotative level where class struggles over meanings occur.

Hall’s other major concept within the essay is the proposition of three categories

or different types of “readings” of messages that he says are possible for media;

dominant-preferred, negotiated, and oppositional6. The dominant-preferred position can

also be called the “preferred” reading, or the decoding of the message which yields a

meaning which corresponds to the “reference code” and therefore is “operating inside

the dominant code”. The opposition reading is a decoding of the reference code which

yields an interpretation which is “globally contrary” to the reference code that

“detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within

some alternative framework of reference” (Hall, 2006, p. 172). In other words, whereas a person who makes a dominant-preferred reading of a media text is logically and

ideologically aligned with the ideology expressed and encoded within the reference

code, a person making an oppositional reading is operating outside the dominant logical

6 Another important point Hall makes is the idea that “the [communication] even must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative event” (Hall, 2006, p. 164). This means that any message must be some kind of “text” before it can be transmitted to receivers who will decode it; it must be received as something meaningful that is capable of being interpreted and decoded 101

space using a different, perhaps contrary ideology—set of attitudes and foundational assumptions about the world—or “framework of reference” in Hall’s words.

The third position, the negotiated, is a mixture of “adaptive and oppositional elements”, a middle position between the two aforementioned. Hall describes his position as operating “with exceptions to the rule” because it gives “the privileged position to the dominant definitions of events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to ‘local conditions’” (p. 172). In other words, at one level, those who make negotiated reading of a text decode in a two-leveled ideological space; on one level they accept the dominant assumptions and meanings encoded into the text but on a second level, closer to their own personal experience, they make modifications where the dominant view does not correspond to their own personal experience. Hall says that it is probable that the “great majority of so-called ‘misunderstandings’ arise from the contradictions and disjunctures between hegemonic-dominant encodings and negotiated-corporate decodings” (p. 172).

Hall’s analysis and framework of decoding strategies is important for many reasons, but probably the most important is that his analysis gives a good answer to the question “how do you know that this or that media text is meant to convey this or that message”? This question is usually asked whenever a critical reading of a media text as ideological, racist, sexist, etc..., is given. Hall provides an analysis of the ways that the production of media messages encodes the views and ideologies of certain institutions and social classes and how the communication itself acts as a system of domination disseminating and perpetuating the views of a dominant class. If Hall’s essay is situated

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historically it is clear that he is responding other theories and critics who pose the question above to critical communications theorists.

Two of the theories or notions Hall was responding to are the psychological theory called the “selective perception” hypothesis, and the other is the concept of

“polysemy”.7 I will deal with the selective perception hypothesis first and polysemy later.

Selective perception is the idea that media users with different degrees of certain psychological biases have different reasons for liking or disliking the same media. For example, a racist person might view a television program and find it to be a fair and accurate picture of the world, while an anti-racist person might find the program to be highly prejudiced. In other words, “selective perception” states that media users/receivers perceive “what they want to perceive” when they encounter and decode certain media and this perception is conditioned by psychological biases.

When reading Hall’s (2006) essay it is fairly clear that he has developed his theory in part in response to the selective perception hypothesis, stating;

In recent years discrepancies...have usually been explained by reference to

‘selective perception’. This is the door via which a residual pluralism evades the

compulsions of a highly structured, asymmetrical and non-equivalent process. Of

course, there will always be private, individual, variant readings. But ‘selective

perception’ is almost never as selective, random or privatized as the concept

suggests. The patterns exhibit, across individual variants, significant clusterings.

7 Another communications theory that seeks to explain why people choose certain media, how they use that media, and what that media does for them is the Uses and Gratifications Theory, which is based in the socio-psychological tradition. Hall mentions this particular theory in passing in his essay, but this theory will not be dealt with in this essay. 103

Any new approach to audience studies will therefore have to begin with a critique

of ‘selective perception’ theory (p. 172)

This passage demonstrates that Hall was addressing proponents of the selective perception theory directly. Hall’s theory was formulated to explicitly address issues of social class; therefore he draws his three decoding categories directly from Parkin’s groupings of individuals’ responses to injustice in society (Parkin, 1971). Hall’s problem with selective perception is that it psychologizes audience interpretation and therefore personalizes the issue of how media receivers decode, ignoring the institutions and social process that underlie the process of media creation and dissemination.

However, the selective perception theory does pose some interesting challenges to Hall’s framework when tested in real-life circumstances. One of the best examples of a media text which seems to defy Hall’s framework--and one which he undoubtedly was aware of--is the popular American sitcom All in the Family (AITF). AITF was a comedy whose protagonist was Archie Bunker, a White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, blue collar man living with his wife, Edith, his daughter and his out-of-work, liberal son-in-law, Mike.

The show caused much controversy when it aired because of Archie’s use of racial and ethnic slurs, and Archie’s verbally abusive, sexist treatment of his longsuffering wife,

Edith.

Many viewers and intellectuals thought that Archie’s behavior normalized racism and that he was a bad role model. However, despite the controversy the show was a hit.

Addressing the controversy, the show’s creator/producer, Norman Lear (1971), claimed that it was his goal to use Archie’s behavior and prejudice to bring those topics “out into the open”, thereby causing viewers to examine their own behaviors and prejudices. Lear

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also believed that the show would combat racism by showing its irrationality because

Archie’s liberal son-in-law Mike “was always the one making sense” while “Archie at best will work out some kind of convoluted logic to make a point. But it’s always foolish.

Totally foolish” (Lear, 1971, p. 17).

Lear’s purpose in crafting the Archie Bunker character was to show the illogic or racism, and also to reveal the intimate and casual racism that is expressed in private.

He wanted to create a character that viewers could relate to, a character in whom they could see reflections of themselves and their friends and family members. He believed that characters such as the “white sheriff who rapes a black woman in the back of his squad car” were ineffective at combating casual racist attitudes because “We’ve had these bigots through the years—one-dimensional, stereotypes—ad nauseam” (Lear,

1971, p. 30). He therefore avoided depicting Archie in such an obviously negative manner and created a character described by certain viewers as “a lovable bigot who helps us all to laugh at ourselves and view our own behavior with new insights” (p. 30)

Applying Hall’s framework to analyze Archie Bunker and All in the Family presents some interesting challenges. Clearly Lear created the show and the characters with for the purpose of combating racism, xenophobia, sexism, and all types of bigotry.

For All in the Family there is a clear, documented “preferred” reading. However, the problems begin when the actual effects on the audience are examined. C. L. Sanders

(1972), writing a critical review of the show in Ebony magazine, argued that contrary to

Lear’s claims that exposing racist attitudes through the character of Archie Bunker would lead to audience introspection and less racism, the character Archie had become a popular figure amongst White viewers. Sanders claimed that Bunker had been

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“elevated to sainthood” amongst many Whites and that there was anecdotal evidence that White children living in mixed neighborhoods who had never heard many racial slurs before were beginning to use them to refer to their black classmates. Sanders mentions that letters to CBS (the broadcaster) concerning the show were “100 to 1 in favor of Bunker”. Sanders quotes the famous syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons as writing that “Norman Lear...and the others behind the show have become deeply concerned that too many viewers are laughing with, not at Archie Bunker. Their fan mail is disturbing them because so much of it applauds Archie and his prejudices” (Sanders,

1972, p. 188).

It would seem that, far from making racism and bigotry unpalatable, AITF had made Archie Bunker popular. More evidence of this came from a study by Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach (1974), which specifically used the “selective perception” hypothesis to analyze and explain the character’s popularity. Vidmar and Rokeach administered a questionnaire to two different sample populations, one Canadian and the other from the USA and composed mostly of adolescents; all the participants the

American sample were white. According to their findings over 60% of viewers in both samples admired Archie more than Mike (the liberal foil) but only 11%-13% thought that

Archie made more sense than Mike. In both samples a minority thought that Archie was the most ridiculed (32% in the Canadian sample and 10% in the American). From the results of their study it was clear that despite the overwhelming majority of respondents who felt that Archie made little sense the character was still popular incredibly popular.

To the question “Has watching the show made you aware that you had prejudices that you didn’t know about?” only 20% of respondents in the Canadian sample answered

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“Yes”; there were no data for this item from the American sample. Vidmar are Rokeach

wrote that “perhaps most disturbing” most viewers “saw nothing wrong with Archie’s use

of ethnic and racial slurs” (p. 42).

It appeared that Norman Lear had failed in his goal to make racism seem illogical and repugnant and to make viewers more aware of their own prejudices. Vidmar are

Rokeach concluded that their “findings surely argue against the contention that All in the

Family has positive effects” but rather “all such findings seem to suggest that the

program is more likely reinforcing prejudice than combating it” (p. 46). Using the

selective perception hypothesis to explain the results of their study they postulate that

“perhaps prejudiced and non-prejudiced persons ascribe different meanings to the

intent and outcome of AITH episodes: non-prejudiced viewers and minority group

viewers may perceive and enjoy the show as satire, whereas prejudiced viewers may

perceive and enjoy the show as episodes ‘telling it like it is’ (p. 37).

The selective perception hypothesis has points of both similarity and difference

with Hall’s framework. Like Hall’s framework Vidmar and Rokeach’s analysis seeks to

understand and explain why the same media can be interpreted in different ways by

different people; Hall postulates the dominant-hegemonic, mediated, and oppositional

readings and Vidmar and Rokeach split their sample groups into “prejudiced” and “non-

prejudiced”. However, whereas an analysis of social structure is inherent to Hall’s

analysis, the selective perception hypothesis as represented in Vidmar and Rokeach’s

study concentrates on the psychology of different individuals. While a social critique

might not be wholly incompatible with the selective perception theory neither is it

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necessary and Vidmar and Rokeach do not bring questions of race and social class into

their analysis of All in the Family.

It was this social blind spot of the selective perception theory that no doubt

stimulated Hall to formulate his framework for decoding. However, the particular case of

All in the Family presents some difficulties for that framework. Principally, the notion of

“preferred reading” in this case does not match neatly with the analysis Hall offers.

Although a basic question that could be asked regarding this aspect is “How does one

know what exactly is the ‘preferred reading’”? I believe that Hall would have easily

answered that question by replying that an analysis of the institutions and processes

which generate media at the production stage. Given the stated intentions of producer

Norman Lear to challenge racism and bigotry the “preferred reading” should be clear.

However, the problem arises when we examine the wider context of the

production stage at the time of the production of All in the Family. The production stage

can be viewed as a series of level proceeding from the position of producer (Lear) to the

broadcaster (CBS) to the wider structure of media production in American society as a

whole. The cultural and social climate of the United States at the time of the production

of the program must also be examined; the conversations and struggles about race,

class, politics, the Vietnam War, the feminist movement, etc., are a crucial part of the

production stage and this concept coincides perfectly with Hall’s framework.

With this background we must ask, if Lear’s anti-racist/anti-bigotry agenda was the preferred reading, were those who like Archie Bunker making an oppositional reading? But, at the time Lear’s project was an outlier; the number of Black and other non-white television stars was relatively small and there were few if any television

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programs with that kind of explicitly anti-racist agenda. If the wider social and cultural context is taken into account, were those who liked Archie Bunker’s racial and ethnic slurs actually making a dominant-hegemonic or negotiated reading?

Another theoretical concept which is in some ways opposed to Hall’s framework and the notion of a preferred reading is polysemy. Polysemy refers to “a textual property of openness that invites readers to actualize the meanings they want...to generate from the verbal and/or visual signs of the media message” and was developed

As a challenge to the implicit or explicit monosemic perspective that has

dominated much literary and cultural analysis, which assumes that the analyst is

capable of discovering the meaning of the text, and that this (ideological)

meaning is rather unproblematically transferred to those who read it. Adherents

of the polysemic perspective thus celebrate the unpredictability and diversity of

meanings that audiences may activate (Schrøder, 2000, p. 239)

Polysemy can be opposed to “hypodermic” or “conveyor belt” theories of communication in which the message is accepted by the audiences in a direct, mechanical fashion, but in many cases, is also opposed to theories like Hall’s which posit one, privileged,

“preferred reading” (Morley, 1992). Polysemic theorists such as John Fiske tend to de- emphasize the text itself and to concentrate on the power of the receiver/audience to generate its own meanings from a text/signal. Thus, the idea that there is a preferred reading which can be accurately read by some audience members is contrary to this theoretical position, although the negotiated and oppositional readings are not. In fact, many times scholars blend Hall’s idea of oppositional readings with the concept of polysemy and multiple readings, but this makes the distinction between direct active

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resistance to a preferred reading and readings that simply vary from the preferred

reading (Dahlgren, 1998, p. 301). Theorists of the polysemic strain, like Fiske, even go

so far as to disregard analysis of the text, or rather, to view the object of analysis as

some kind of combination of the text and the audience as a unit. As Fiske argues, “we

have now collapsed the distinction between ‘text’ and ‘audience’...There is no text, there

is no audience, there are only the processes of viewing” (Fiske, 1989, pp. 56-7).

One of the opponents of the polysemic view is David Morley, the British media theorist who used Hall’s framework extensively in his 1980 study of the British television series Nationwide. Writing about polysemic theories of audience reception, Morley

criticized research that “romanticizes [sic] the role of the reader” and are “marred by a

facile insistence on the polysemy of media products and by an undocumented

presumption that forms of interpretative resistance are more widespread than

subordination or the reproduction of dominant meanings” (Morley, 1992, p. 20).

Morley follows Hall in rejecting the notion of a text that can be decoded completely freely by focusing on the structures that determine the creation of the text and that are within the text itself. Morley (1992) argues that;

The analysis of the text or message remains...a fundamental necessity,

for the polysemy of the message is not without its own structure.

Audiences do not see only what they want to see, since a message (or

programme) is not simply a window on the world, but a construction.

While the message is not an object with one real meaning, there are

within it signifying mechanisms which promote certain meanings, even

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on privileged meaning, and suppress others, these are the directive

closures encoded in the message (p. 21)

Thus, Morley and Hall do not completely disregard the possibility of readings other than the preferred reading, but because they recognize that media are inherently ideological and therefore inherently reflect the worldview of the media creators and not some unmediated, directly accessible view of “reality” the ways that audiences respond to media will be conditioned by the “directive closures” structuring the media text. This is why Hall’s framework includes categories for negotiated and oppositional readings; Hall wanted to preserve the agency of audiences to construct their own understandings of texts but realized that the institutions and ideologies that produce media cannot simply be done away with.

The case of Archie Bunker and All in the Family would seem to reflect this understanding. Even viewers who liked Archie were thinking about the character in terms of race, class, ethnicity and the other socio-cultural factors that make up English- speaking North American society. Their readings may have diverged from what producer-creator Norman Lear intended but the readings were conditioned by the issues he wished to address.

However, there is still the question of determining what exactly is the preferred reading and how the audience is supposed to know what that is. Even if we can accept that institutions and ideology structure the text, In the case of All in the Family was

Norman Lear’s desired message actually hegemonic in the context of late 1960s/early

1970s America? Were the audience members who like Archie making a negotiated

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reading or an oppositional reading? And if the reading was oppositional, what were they opposing, the anti-racist message?

Even Morley realized there were limitations to the Hall framework, especially when analyzing texts that were not purely informational, like news programs. Although, he still believed that Hall’s framework “offers the best alternative to a conception of media texts as equally ‘open’ to any and all interpretations...which readers wish to make of them,” even though he recognized that it needed “development and amendments in various respects” (Morley, 1992, p. 21).

The media theorist Kim Schrøder (2000) has attempted to make such developments and amendments to Hall’s framework by offering his own

“multidimensional model” of mass media reception which “proposes that we distinguish between readers’ subjectively experienced agreement or disagreement with the media text on the one hand...and the researcher’s ‘evaluation’ of the role played by readers’ positions in hegemonic struggles” (p. 236). Schrøder gives the example of a mock ad campaign created to test audience reactions to corporate involvement in charitable causes to illustrate the limitations of Hall’s framework. In the study that used the mock campaign audience members read an advertisement which included the logo of the

Mohawk Oil company as addressing the plight of Canadian aborigines although the creator of the advertisement did not intend to transmit that meaning. From this case

Schrøder attempts to buttress Hall’s framework by focusing on various dimensions of audience reception studies that also take into consideration the attitudes and positions of the researcher.

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Schrøder (2000) argues that, “We can hardly claim that the ‘preferred reading’ is a property of the text,” and then asks whether the preferred reading is “The reading

intended by the [media]’s creator, or the reading actualized by a majority of informants”

(p. 236). Schrøder notes that one shortcoming of Hall’s model is that, “It sees

‘polysemy’ solely as a feature of the connotative level of meaning, that is, the

informants’ awareness of and attitude to the cultural meaning” (p. 236). This is an

important point because, although Hall does admit that misunderstandings of denotative

meanings can occur, he does not emphasize this point and concentrates his analysis

solely on the connotative level.

Another shortcoming of Hall’s model is that it focuses solely on differences in

decodings as a result of social class while other social divisions such as race, ethnicity,

and age are also important. This class focus is most likely a result of Hall transforming

the work of Parkin (1971) for use in the field of media studies. Schrøder argues that this

class focus “disqualifies the decoding part of the model from any claim to being a

general model of reception, as it is simply not equipped to deal with other ideological

scenarios, as for instance a ‘conservative’ reading of a TV programme encoded with a

‘socialist’ preferred meaning” (p. 240). This criticism identifies the aspect of Hall’s model

which makes it insufficient for a full analysis of a television program like All in the Family and the phenomenon of Archie Bunker’s popularity. In order to explain that kind of audience reaction aspects other than class must be examined as well.

Another weakness of the model is that its focus on ideological struggle “appears to bias it in favour of those textual genres (like news and current affairs programmes) in which an ideological position is more easily discernible” (Morley, 1992, p. 21). This is

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another reason why Hall’s model is unable to explain media texts like All in the Family.

Such a television program does not claim to deliver some kind of unbiased, value-free information about the world, rather its purpose is almost purely recreational (although this does not mean that the program is free of ideology and it has an educational component).

Schrøder (2000) also takes issue with the notion of the “preferred reading” stating

Epistemologically, the attempt to discover one privileged textual meaning

is bound to fail, for the simple reason that any decoding, even that of a

skilled textual analyst, is always already another encoding, that is, a

product of the decoder’s cultural and communicative repertoires, and

therefore marginally or substantially different from all other readings. (p.

241)

In order to address these weaknesses of Hall’s model Schrøder’s (2000) multidimensional model attempts to focus solely on the reception process and

“takes the encoding process for granted, seeing it simply as the ‘moment’ that produces the media text encountered by the audiences” (p. 242). Schrøder also claims that the “multidimensional model” is less theoretical and more empirically- driven than Hall’s model, relying on research about audience experiences and that it views reception in terms of dimensions and not a series of processes. The six dimensions of Schrøder’s model are: Motivations, Comprehension,

Discrimination, Position, Evaluation and Implementation. These are divided into two groups. One consists of the four “reading” dimensions consisting of

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Comprehension, Discrimination, Position, and Motivation. The other groups are

called “implications” and consists of Evaluation and Implementation. Schrøder

also claims that his model maintains the distinction between “polysemy” and

“opposition”, something that many theorists fail to do when discussing or using

Hall’s model.

Within the “reading” dimensions, Motivation refers to whether and how

much people are interested in engaging with a particular media text. If people are

not interested in watching a particular film or reading a particular book, then they

can make no “reading” of that text (although, their lack of motivation is in itself an

important object of research).

Comprehension refers to how people understand signs within media and

Schrøder relies on Peirce's understanding of the sign as having a fundamental social-semiotic element (something that stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity) “according to which specific encoded media meanings

are differentially decoded denotatively and connotatively by audience members

according to both macro-social factors...and micro-social/situational relations”

(Schrøder, 2000, p. 246). This social aspect is represented in Peirce's semiotics

by the concept of the “interpretant”, the “mental image” or unique interpretation a

person has of a sign, not the actual sign itself.

The Discrimination dimension refers to the audience’s or receiver’s

awareness of the constructedness of a text. To what extent does the audience

recognize the ideological interests and aesthetic decisions that comprise a text?

Audience reactions to media within this dimension are measured on a continuum

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from immersion to critical distance; a person fully immersed would not recognize any constructedness and a person at perfect critical distance would read the text as being a complete creation of social and ideological forces.

The Position dimension refers to the social position and subjective attitude of the recipient/audience to a media text. Schrøder designates this dimension because of the inability of Hall’s model to deal with situations in which people reject or accept a media text based on an “incorrect” understanding of the ideological message and position of that text, thus ignoring “the analyst’s desire to position readings ‘objectively’ in the political-ideological landscape” (Schrøder, 2000, p. 249). An example demonstrating why this dimension is important can be taken from Morley’s Nationwide study. In the example, a group of trainee managers read the program as being socialist with a pro- union bias, however Morley understood that “the program ‘really’ promotes a populist version of capitalist hegemony” (Schrøder, 2000, p. 249). This “objective” understanding of a text’s ideological position is developed by scholars and researchers and is dealt with by another dimension within the model, Evaluation.

Evaluation is the dimension that deals with the “objective” domain of analysis created by the researcher/scholar. Scholars, unlike non-specialist audience members, use political and sociological analysis to develop their readings of the ideological positions of media texts. Indeed, the “Motivation” and

“Position” of a scholar is different when engaging with media, and most scholars take a critical stand towards media, although this is by no means perfect.

Through the distinction of the “Position” and “Evaluation” dimensions Schrøder avoids “the one-to-one relationship which the Hall model establishes between

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negatively valorized ‘accepting’ and ‘hegemonic’ readings on the one hand, and

between positively valorized ‘rejecting’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ readings on the other” (Schrøder, 2000, p. 250).

The last dimension, “Implementation”, refers to the political implications of audience readings of media texts. If audiences make “oppositional” readings of media texts, will this then spur them on toward some kind of political action or will the resistance remain internal only? Scholars with a polysemic focus such as

Fiske (1989) may think that internal resistance to the ideology represented by a media text is potent in itself, while others like Morley or Condit (1989) may be more skeptical about the possibility of concrete resistance in the external world.8

It is obvious how a multidimensional approach can buttress Hall’s model,

ameliorating its deficiencies and helping us to make sense out of the audience

responses to All in the Family and Archie Bunker, in particular the concepts of

the dimensions of Comprehension, Discrimination, Position, and Evaluation. In

the case of All in the Family an analysis of the social and cultural landscape of

the nation at the time and of the remarks of the producer/creator reveals what the

“preferred reading” of the program was, and also that the preferred reading was

in fact not in alignment with the dominant/hegemonic attitudes of the nation as a

whole. Depending on the “Position” of a viewer, including various attributes such

as race, class, gender, ethnicity, etc., audience decodings were variable and

therefore did not align neatly with the dominant/hegemonic-oppositional binary.

8 Condit, C.M. (1989) ‘The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6(2): 103–22. / Fiske, J. (1989) ‘Moments of Television: Neither the Text nor the Audience’, in E. Seiter et al. (eds) Remote Control. Television, Audiences and Cultural Power. London: Routledge. 117

Those White American audience members who liked the character Archie

Bunker understood the character to be “telling it like it is” even though his

reasoning was “illogical”. They also failed to discern the satirical, anti-racist

nature of the program. On one level they seemed to have been accepting of the

program but rejected the “preferred reading”(the reading of Lear and the

encoders of the text), therefore making an “oppositional reading”. Yet their

inability to discern the anti-racism suggests they read the program from the

dominant position of racial ideology in America. However, in some ways neither

an oppositional, negotiated, nor dominant reading can be identified, since the

preferred satirical message was not comprehended in the first place.

Thus, the multidimensional model allows us to make use of information

pertinent to the analysis of audience decodings that Hall’s model does not

examine. While the multidimensional model when used in conjunction with Hall’s

model is a formidable tool for media analysis, there is one other model, or way of

conceiving of media, which meshes nicely with the previous two that I believe

makes an excellent addition to our group of conceptual techniques. This model is the concept of the semiosphere conceived by Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman.

Two of Lotman’s concepts are useful for media/cultural analysis: the semiosphere and cultural explosion. These two concepts are related in that they are three-dimensional metaphors for describing cultures and communication. Lotman’s

(2005) semiosphere concept was influenced by Soviet biochemist V.I. Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere, or the layer of living matter covering the Earth’s crust. By cultural explosion, Lotman (2009) means the drastic, disjunctive changes that occur

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within a cultural system. These two concepts can be thought of in terms of a sphere

moving in the fourth dimension of time. Being three-dimensional, the sphere has

different regions along the vertical axis but also horizontally; taken together the

semiosphere and cultural explosion illustrate diachronic, non-simultaneous development

within a system.

Following V.I. Vernadsky, who conceived of the biosphere as being not only the sphere of living matter, but also that which created the conditions which make life possible, Lotman defines the semiosphere as being not only the space in which communication takes place, but also that which makes any communication possible.

The idea of space is also important, since Lotman claims that the semiosphere is not only abstract, existing only in the mind, but is also material and manifests in three- dimensional space.

Lotman updates a different communication model developed by Roman

Jakobson. Jakobson’s model has six aspects, as opposed to Hall’s three: the addresser, the context, the message itself, the contact, the code, and the addressee.

Jakobson also posits six functions of language that each refer to one of the six aspects: referential (orientation toward the context), emotive (focusing on the addresser), conative (the function of influencing the addressee) phatic (focusing on the context, the function of establishing and continuing communication), metalingual (the function referring to the code itself), and the poetic (a focus on the message itself).

Lotman, on the other hand, focuses on the text itself, a hallmark of his theory being his assertion that the smallest unit of meaning in a language is the text, as opposed to other units such as sentences or individual words. Lotman

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considers even Jakobson’s more elaborate scheme to be lacking since both addressee and addresser share the same code and there is only one message that is sent and later received, more or less intact, by the addressee. Lotman’s theory emphasizes translation; every reading of a text is the translation of information from one language into another, and the result will never be identical to the original text pre-translation. Also, for Lotman, the semiosphere comes even before the code or the context for any act of dialogue between an addresser and addressee. This is because before any messages within using any particular language can be sent the processes of communication—which is not necessarily linguistic—must exist.

The concept of boundary is crucial for the semiosphere. Within the boundary of the semiosphere lies all that is intelligible, all content that is considered to be language or culture. Outside the boundary of the semiosphere everything is nonsense, non-linguistic, non-cultural. From the point of view of one semiosphere, the languages and culture of a semiosphere beyond its boundary is not language at all; the texts that it produces are meaningless until they are translated into the language of the first semiosphere.

Another of the key aspects of the semiosphere is the binary of center and periphery. The center represents the core of a culture or society, this is where the dominant ideologies, worldviews, behaviors, language, etc., reside and are produced. In

Hall’s/Gramscian terms the center could be said to be hegemonic or dominant. The periphery is the realm of non-standard, subordinate cultures, languages, and ideologies.

The periphery could be said to be the locus of “oppositional” readings in Hall’s model. In

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fact, Lotman’s concept of center and periphery was influenced by the ideas of the

Russian formalist Tynianov and originally refers to literary texts. Tynianov and Lotman

conceive of cultures as a series of concentric circles. In the center of the series are the

authoritative, canonical texts while the periphery is occupied by experimental, irregular,

non-standard texts.

Lotman says that the center and periphery are in constant tension, and this

tension is productive of meaning. Within the cultural system, there is a constant

centripetal force created as the irregular texts on the periphery attempt to move toward

the center and the center attempts to keep them away. This leads to changes in the

culture of the system as the core, attempting to maintain equilibrium, incorporates some

elements from the periphery, producing new meanings, texts, and ways of

interpretation. The “explosions” are not necessarily instantaneous events and can take

years to complete their cycles of transformation, and Lotman identifies slower,

“continuous” explosions and sudden, disjunctive explosions.

I believe that Lotman’s concepts are useful for understanding the reception of media texts, especially those like All in the Family and the popularity of its main character Archie Bunker. Lotman’s ideas about language, culture, and communication elaborate the areas of media production and reception that Hall’s model overlooks.

Also, while Schrøder’s multi-dimensional model provides categories that analyze the positions of audiences within the society, categories that take into account audiences’ different levels of awareness of the constructedness of texts, and the ways that researchers own knowledge of society and culture help shape their analyses, his model

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is constructed for reception studies and useful for understanding why and how different

individuals within an audience decode texts in certain ways.

Lotman’s ideas provide a way of looking at textual production and reception as a

whole, as a part of a dynamic culture constantly in tension between new texts and

codes and established texts at the core. They combine within them the basic concepts

found within Hall’s and Schrøder’s model, but approaches communication and media

using a visual and biological metaphor, viewing culture as an organism. He focuses not only on how audiences react, but the kind of system that produces texts, and the dynamic cultural processes that shape that text and how it is communicated.

In the case of All in the Family, if we use Hall’s model directly, we are forced to designate the fans of Archie Bunker as taking an oppositional stance to the dominant/hegemonic text. But in the context of late 1960s North America Norman Lear’s intentions in producing the program were not necessarily “hegemonic”. So, if we designate the fans of Archie as making a dominant/hegemonic reading we are also in error. Using Lotman’s concepts of semiosphere and cultural explosion along with

Schrøder’s multidimensional model helps us to understand how audience readings are made within the diachronic development of a culture and are conditioned by the internal tensions between a center that attempts to maintain its position and a cultural periphery.

A Multi-Dimensional Approach to the KONY 2012 Phenomenon

A multi-dimensional approach along with the concepts of the semiosphere and cultural explosion can explain many of the contradictions of the KONY 2012 campaign

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and why it achieved such support and popularity. If we examine the campaign with a

standard understanding of propaganda then we should be surprised that so many

young people fell prey to the campaigns persuasion. For experts and journalists, and

even those completely unfamiliar with Uganda, the film’s portrayal of Kony and Uganda

was a gross oversimplification. Indeed, the film drew criticisms from Africa experts and

common users of the web who made critical response videos or posted critical

comments. Proponents of a cultural populist viewpoint would be hard-pressed to explain

how millions of people could be swayed by such simplistic and, in some ways,

mainstream political exhortations that basically amounted to pressuring government

representatives to authorize military intervention without concluding that those millions

were successfully deceived by skillful propagandists. However, using the

multidimensional model we can see how and why so many viewers were attracted to

the message of KONY 2012.

Schrøder’s dimension of “position” seems to be most relevant to the KONY 2012

case. According to Finnegan (2013b) the “position” of most Invisible Children supporters

within American society is surprisingly similar. In 2009 Finnegan performed twenty-six

interviews with thirty-one students, activists, employees and critics of Invisible Children.

Finnegan discovered that Invisible Children activists and supporters were “primarily white race, upper-middle class, female gender, evangelical Christian religious affiliation, and adolescent age” (Finneganb, 2013, p. 146). Finnegan also found that most of activists involved with Invisible Children were not puzzled by the demographic makeup of the movement. The location of these activists in the American semiosphere would be somewhere near the center of Lotman’s semiosphere.

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Given this information we can understand how so many people of this

position made a preferred reading of the KONY 2012 video. The values shown in

the video and its portrayal of the world aligns with their own experiences. As

Finnegan notes, “The homogeneity of the privileged collective of Invisible

Children activists…is reflected in a common understanding of the world, one

premised on meritocracy and an acceptance that capitalist economic systems

and strategic military operatives are viable” (Finneganb, 2013, p. 147). Invisible

Children’s message in KONY 2012 was an appeal to the center of the American

semiosphere. Given the position, these audience members would not have found

much within the video that would cause them to give an oppositional reading.

One interviewee told Finnegan (2013b) that Invisible Children: “Can be so effective in motivating people [because] they all share a common understanding of the world, common language, common experiences, that you can then use, common symbols essentially, that you can then use to motivate them” (p. 147).

In relation to the text the reading of those who supported the campaign was “preferred”, but in relation to some aspects of society, for the supporters at least, the reading was oppositional. The KONY 2012 video gives an image of youth as a catalyst for revolution against the apathetic adults and politicians who control the nation. By clothing itself in the guise of a culturally oppositional text,

Invisible Children was able to take advantage of the desire of certain audience members to break away from these traditional structures, even if only in a limited way. One of Finnegan’s interviewees contrasted Invisible Children to Amnesty

International, a much more traditional, mainstream NGO: “When you look at a

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group like Amnesty, I’m not dissing on Amnesty’s work—but—why isn’t Amnesty motivating more people? You know, you like don’t really see really excited

Amnesty activists across the country” (Finneganb, 2013, p. 147). For affluent youth at the center of the American semiosphere, Invisible Children offered the opportunity to rebel and made them feel as if they had the power to change the world, but in what Finnegan calls a “non-wave-making” fashion that did not really challenge existing institutions.

We can also examine the IC supporters’ reading using Schrøder’s dimension of “comprehension”. The “comprehension” dimensions refers to how audiences decode the “signs”—in Peirce’s sense—contained within media.

Peirce’s concept of the sign is useful here because of the concept of the

“interpretant” or the different ways that a sign is understood by each individual, and also because

A Peircean perspective conceptualizes the analysis of media signifying

processes not within a general, abstract linguistic system where meanings

are fixed, and are assumed to be transferred to the recipients’ minds, but

in a communicative context where meanings are only potential until

actualized by socially situated human beings. For Peirce the social

situatedness of sign users is a function of the interpretive communities

they belong to (Schrøder, 1994, p. 344)

Schrøder (1994) offers the examples of Brown and Schulze’s (1990) study of the different ways Black and White viewers understood the pop star Madonna’s music video “Papa Don’t Preach”. The researchers found that White viewers

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were almost twice as likely as Black viewers interpret the video as being about teen pregnancy and Black viewers were twice as likely to interpret the video as being a story of father-daughter relationships. The study found that race and gender highly condition the way the video was interpreted. We can say that race and gender were conditions for the formation of “interpretive communities” that shared similar ways of viewing the same media.

Given what we know about the demographic makeup of the Invisible

Children’s supporters and the images of Africa it portrays we can use the concepts of interpretive community and the “comprehension” dimension to understand why KONY 2012 was so popular with a large segment of the

American population, but also generated such strong criticism.

At least one of Finnegan’s (2013b) interviewees said that most Invisible

Children supporters shared a common understanding of the world and common experiences; in other words, they constituted an interpretive community. This community was mostly affluent, White, young, and female. Finnegan found that the young females in IC often expressed fascination with the male protagonists of the organization’s documentaries. They also felt compassion for the children of

Africa portrayed in these films. The portrayal of Uganda specifically, and Africa in general, as a defenseless child in need of help has a long history in the West. An

1894 cartoon in the magazine Punch, entitled ‘The Black Baby’, depicted Uganda as an abandoned baby, left on the doorstep of the personification of England,

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John Bull. A caption at the bottom reads: “What, another!!—Well, I suppose I

must take it in!!”9

The cartoon reveals a common understanding of Africa in the West that

sees the continent as dependent and infantilized. This is the common

understanding of the world, or at least of Africa, that the young supporters of

Invisible Children drew upon when viewing the KONY 2012 video. The visions of

Jacob, the young Ugandan boy Jason Russell met in northern Uganda before he

started Invisible Children, would have elicited sympathy from viewers that shared

the interpretive frame of the supporters of IC.

These same concepts of interpretive community and “comprehension” also help to explain the backlash against KONY 2012. Obviously, Ugandans themselves would have read the video from a completely different point of view from Invisible Children’s young constituents. But also, by 2012, many of the traditional cultural understandings of Africa were already being challenged, and

social media gave dissenting voices a greater ability to be heard. For example,

as noted by Krabill (2012), after the release of KONY 2012, Nigerian-American

writer Teju Cole criticized the video on Twitter as an example of what he called

the “White Savior Industrial Complex”. In a post that echoes Finnegan’s

observations, Cole stated: “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about

justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege” (p.

53).

Positioned differently from the young, affluent, female, evangelical

Christians that Invisible Children targeted, from outside of their interpretive

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community, Cole was able to render an oppositional reading to the KONY 2012 video that was echoed by Ugandans and critics in the United States. Both Cole and IC’s supporters saw the same images of a helpless impoverished Africa, but their respective interpretations of these signs were completely divergent. An element of the “discrimination” dimension is also at work here, since Cole’s criticisms show that he was able to view the video not as an unbiased representation of Africa, but as a carefully constructed text produced to elicit emotional reactions, and action, from the audience.

Conclusion

A multidimensional approach to KONY 2012 is helpful in that it avoids setting up a simple binary between a negatively-valorized “preferred reading” and a positively-valorized “oppositional” reading. This approach also avoids the simple notion of a strong version of polysemic and cultural populist approaches that posit that audiences are completely free to make whatever meanings they like from media. Viewed in this way, we can understand that KONY 2012 became so popular in part because while it did present a mainstream version of events in

Uganda that in many ways was retrograde and neo-imperialist, for its target population it was viewed as being rebellious and non-conformist. In a maneuver that echoes the way the center incorporates elements of the periphery in

Lotman’s semiosphere concept, the target audience was allowed to be oppositional without the danger of actually being in a position of direct antagonism to traditional institutions and ideologies.

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In the next chapter, the KONY 2012 video will be examined as an example of “militainment”, or media that features military themes or values in an entertaining way that abstracts depictions of war from the brutal reality of actual war.

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CHAPTER 4: THE MILITARY-ENTERTAINMENT-COMPLEX AND KONY 2012 AS

MILITAINMENT RECRUITMENT SRATEGY FOR VIRTUOUS WAR

Introduction

In the final scene of Stanley Kubrick’s (1987) Vietnam War film, Full Metal

Jacket, a squad of marines march in the night, their shapes illuminated by the faint

amber glow of a burning city—presumably Huế—in the distance. As they march in the

twilight, they sing in unison the theme song to the popular children’s show, The Mickey

Mouse Club. The juxtaposition of the image of the soldiers marching past the desolation

of the historic Vietnamese city and the sounds of the carefree song is a powerful scene,

but one that may be taken as either out-of-place or as just an obtuse insertion by a director famed for his complexity. However, the scene is a subtle and brilliant critique of

American imperialism and consumer culture which echoes Ellul’s (1968) concept of social propaganda; and by doing so, in a single scene Kubrick shows the connection between entertainment, education, and the military.

Kubrick (1987) shows us the marines as young men raised and educated—in the true meaning of the word pedagogy—on the wholesome, middle-class values represented in the Walt Disney corporation’s media products, and turned into killers by the military apparatus of the nation whose values are supposedly represented in those products. As Schiller (1973) explains, the entertainment produced by the Walt Disney

Corporation and other media companies is educational and not merely mindless fun:

“The notion that entertainment is not instructive must be classed as one of the biggest

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deceptions in history” (p. 80). Quoting historian of American radio and television, Erik

Barnouw, Schiller says,

Entertainment is a poisonous concept. The idea of entertainment is that it has

nothing to do with the serious problems of the world but that it fills up an idle

hour. Actually, there is an ideology implicit in every kind of fictional story. Fiction

may be far more important than non-fiction in forming people’s opinions…popular

entertainment…is basically propaganda for the status quo (p. 80)

Kubrick’s choice of the The Mickey Mouse Club theme song is significant. Even during the Vietnam War Era Disney was one of the most profitable media companies in the world, and since then its power and size have only grown. The educational function of Disney’s media was recognized decades ago. Dr. Max Rafferty (1965), two-time

California State Superintendent of Instruction, called Walt Disney, the company’s founder, “the greatest educator of this century—greater than John Dewey or James

Conant or all the rest of us put together” (p. A5).

Rafferty (1965) praised Disney for the moral and ethical education Disney gave to viewers through the values represented in his media. These values were essentially middle-American and consumerist, seemingly eschewing controversial topics and politics. Mattelart (1973) argues that, “Disney uses animality, infantilism, and innocence

to mask the web of interests that form a socially and historically determined and

concretely situated system: North American imperialism” (p. 428). Mattelart analyses a

Disney comic book featuring the character Donald Duck to show that the values

expressed in Disney’s media are veiled supports for American capitalism. In one comic,

situated in the fictional Caribbean nation of San Bananador, a group of pirates who

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enslave Donald Duck and his nephews also ship weapons to rebels based in the

country. While trying to escape from the authorities, one of the pirates raises his hand

into the air and shouts, “Long live the revolution!”, and Donald says only the symbol of

law and order, the Navy, can save him and his nephews. The message here is that

Caribbean revolutionaries—like Castro of Cuba, for example—actually want to create

oppressive regimes to enslave society and only the American empire can bring freedom

and order. Thus, Mattelart (1973) suggests why the final scene in Full Metal Jacket is

appropriate. The young marines marching past the ruins of Huế sing the theme song of the Walt Disney Corporation’s mascot because the corporation and its capitalist, consumerist, imperialist values have raised them. Through its media they learned that it was their duty to bring freedom and order to those “oppressed” by communist revolutionaries across the world, whatever the cost. Indeed, entertainment is not simply innocent fun.

The theme of this chapter will be the symbiotic relationship between the US military, communications, and media. The chapter will attempt to demonstrate that the history of the relationship between the military and entertainment is long and that this has led to a cross-pollination of themes and techniques between the entertainment industry and the military. The relationship discussed here is relevant to the KONY 2012 video because, in a manner reminiscent of Ellul’s (1968) conception of “sociological propaganda”, the video’s creators were influenced by the themes and aesthetics of popular military shooter video games and military-themed action films and that this

influence is apparent in the visual design and editing of the video.

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The influence of military shooter games and military-themed films is important because the target audience of KONY 2012 was American youth (from teens to early

20’s). According to statistics, 47% of gamers are between 18 and 49 years old, and

many children younger than 18 are avid gamers10. One video game that will be

discussed in this chapter, America’s Army, was developed by the US Army specifically

to garner a rating that would make it suitable for the majority of teens. Other shooter

games developed with military support are also aimed at the teen and young adult

markets.

The argument of the chapter is that KONY 2012 represents an instance of the

convergence and merger of entertainment and military. Furthermore, it is argued that

the convergence of these two fields has progressed to a point that a separation of

motives is almost impossible and that we now live in a time when military logics have

over-coded themselves onto society by means of virtual reality and simulation. KONY

2012 exists within a circuit between the military and the entertainment industry. The

video is informed by media products that were created either by the military or with input

and assistance from the military. On the other end of the equation, the KONY 2012

video sought to give the military cause for a humanitarian intervention in a foreign state,

thus completing the circuit.

The Military Complexes

President Dwight D. Eisenhower first introduced the term “military-industrial

complex” (MIC) in his farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961, the eve of the

inauguration of President Kennedy. Eisenhower warned Americans that they should

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guard against the influence, “sought or unsought” of the powerful amalgamation military

power, the defense industry, and government. Later, in the late 1960s, the

communications scholar Herbert Schiller researched the importance of

telecommunications technology and industry in the military-industrial nexus, adding an extra “C”, for communications, to the MIC. Schiller was a true pioneer in researching the ways the military-corporate nexus controlled both the technological structure of communications technology and influenced the nature of the content that was delivered to audiences through that technology.

Before Schiller’s groundbreaking research there was little attention paid to the commoditization and weaponization of the electromagnetic spectrum by this nexus. Schiller’s research differed with the contemporary optimistic attitude towards revolutions in communications technology is represented by theorists like Daniel Bell. Bell’s The Coming of a Post-Industrial Society was published the same year as Schiller’s The Mind Managers but

With the help of people like Dallas Smythe and George Gerbner, Schiller

worked to fill this intellectual blindspot by describing what amounted to a

military-industrial-communication complex. The complex was comprised of

a powerful set of networks that linked the military, intelligence agencies,

large businesses, particularly military contractors, and major media along

with their increasingly powerful allies in the computer, communication, and

information technology sectors (Mosco, 2001, p.193)

Schiller astutely recognized the tendency of the marriage between the military and business to spread into and colonize new domains:

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Department of Defense contract researchers will produce…a large portion

of the new scientific and technical knowledge becoming available. One

consequence of this pattern is that entirely new fields of study, as well as

their practical application, become the exclusive preserve of the Armed

Forces (Schiller, 1970, p. 171)

Military development and innovation of new technologies such as radio for communications, computers for targeting systems and anti-aircraft guns, radar for tracking, and orbital satellites for communications and surveillance, yielded new segments of the natural world that could be used for military purposes, but the military’s close relationship to industry and the business world allowed these new technologies to be passed into the hands of private corporations:

Missing in virtually every account of freewheeling entrepreneurs and visionary

venture capitalists is the military’s role, intentional and otherwise, in creating and

sustaining Silicon Valley. For better and for worse, Silicon Valley owes its present

configuration to patterns of federal spending, corporate strategies, industry-

university relationships, and technological innovation shaped by the assumptions

and priorities of Cold War defense policy. (Leslie, 2000, p. 49)

The military also makes use of technology developed by private enterprise for the consumer market. Examples of this include the use of a modified version of the video game Doom for training Marines, and US Air Force’s creation of a supercomputer from

1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 consoles (Zyga, 2010).

Telecommunications and media and their use for entertainment and recreation are another field which evinces a very productive relationship between the military and

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private industry. The relationship in this field was first described as the Military-

Entertainment-Complex (MEC) by J.C. Herz (1997). This new complex reveals the extension into new areas which Schiller noticed and is manifested in everything from television shows, comic books, Hollywood blockbusters, and triple-A videogames.

Media theorists use the word “militainment” to describe the products of the military- entertainment-complex. According to Stahl (2010), militainment is:

State violence translated into an object of pleasurable consumption. Beyond this,

the word also suggests that this state violence is not of the abstract, distant, or

historical variety but rather an impending or current use of force, one directly

relevant to the citizen's current political life (p. 6)

Talk of militainment and the MEC picked up in the early 2000s with the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the wake of Pentagon press packages broadcast by evening news programs, and the trend of “embedding” reporters with military units:

There's a new alliance in Hollywood: the military-entertainment complex. The

networks need a new twist on reality TV, the genre that has cooled since 9/11—

or perhaps, in part, because of it. The Pentagon has a p.r. issue: How do you

maintain public interest in a war that could stay on simmer—an air strike here, a

wiretap there—for years? The symbiotic solution: send reality TV to war

(Poniewozik, 2002, p. 20)

During the early days of Gulf War II and the “War on Terror” The Department of

Defense and various branches of the military collaborated with television networks and movie studios to produce entertainment content such as reality television shows, television dramas, and feature films. The military was eager to work with the

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entertainment industry because “the military [saw] what television analysts call

''militainment'' as one of the most effective ways to get its message across, free of the

filters of a critical press corps” (Seelye, 2002). For the audiences watching this

programming and content becomes their only experience and knowledge of “war”.

“Reality TV” shows such as “Profiles from the Front Line”, “Military Diaries”, and

“American Fighter Pilot” gave American audiences a taste of military life. These shows

were a part of the trend of “embedding” that began during the Second Iraq War, when

journalists began to live and travel with groups of soldiers deployed in Iraq.

The avowed purpose of embedding was to bring a more authentic and objective experience of the events of the war to the American citizenry, especially since the first

Gulf War had come to be described as a “video game war”. While the programs’ producers claimed that they had “carte blanche” when creating the shows

Each show also goes in, at least figuratively, with a military escort. The producers

are "casting" their shows and say they have final cut, though they will screen

episodes for the military to ensure they don't give away secrets. But Washington

can pull the plug anytime (Poniewozik, 2002, p. 20)

But one wonders how much latitude the producers have since military personnel review

scripts before the shows are given the final edit and broadcast. Speaking of his

experience on the television drama JAG, James Eliot, the star of the show, said: “We

send our scripts to our [Pentagon] liaison and they weigh in on it...,” but the scriptwriters

and producers were careful not to offend the liaisons, “because they certainly lend a

great deal of production value that we couldn't buy” (Seelye, 2002).

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The case of JAG is quite instructive and demonstrates the extent to with the simulation of the military and war that exists on the screen becomes indistinguishable from reality, or rather, shapes the way viewers conceive of reality by offering the only version of an event or process that viewers can easily experience:

This is a fictional television drama exploring what a military tribunal, as proposed

by President Bush, might look like...Because the real tribunals, which have not

yet been scheduled, are to be open to newspaper and magazine reporters but

not to television cameras, ''JAG'' is offering the first and perhaps only visual

version of the tribunals that millions of people will see. That version to be

stamped on the public consciousness, with the power and immediacy of images

and action, will show conscientious ''JAG'' officers treating terrorist suspects to

many of the rights of the American justice system (Seelye, 2002).

The “tribunals” in question are military courts (different from courts martial) that exercise jurisdiction over enemy soldiers. The last time the United States government used military tribunals to try foreigners occurred during World War II in the 1942 Supreme

Court case, Ex Parte Quirin. Controversially, after the invasion of Afghanistan, President

Bush and his administration desired to try imprisoned individuals, both foreigners and citizens, as “enemy combatants”; a designation that would allow them to fall under the purview of military jurisprudence and would allow the common law protections of civilian courts to be withheld from them.

The Bush administration’s attempt to carry out these tribunals was contested by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Since decades had passed since any actual military tribunals had been held in the United States, the fictional portrayal of the

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tribunals would be the only experience and source of knowledge most Americans would

have of these kinds of military-judicial proceedings. The producers of the television

show JAG collaborated with the US military, tailoring the scripts in order to give a

positive portrayal of the tribunals even though the use of tribunals was controversial.

The example from JAG shows how the close relationship between the entertainment

industry and the military shapes the content of entertainment media in an attempt to

influence the opinions of audiences.

Spectacular War and the Virtual Citizen-Soldier

Roger Stahl (2010) explains militainment as the result of a transition from

“spectacular war” and the corresponding “citizen-spectator” subject, to “interactive war”

and the corresponding “virtual citizen-soldier”. “Spectacular War” arises during the social-economic mode termed “The Spectacle” by French theorist Guy Debord. The citizen-spectator is the subject of spectacular war. The citizen-spectator is passive, disconnected, and alienated, and war is a “televised consumable” similar to any other consumer commodity. Propaganda in the spectacle avoids engaging in rational appeals and arguments in favor of fostering disengagement:

Whereas propaganda rationally engages with argument and narrative, the

spectacle forgoes persuasion in favor of fostering disengagement. Whereas

propaganda addresses an audience that matters, the spectacle presumes an

audience that does not. And whereas propaganda seeks to answer the question

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of why we fight, the spectacle loses itself in the fact that we fight (Stahl, 2010, p.

31).

It should be noted here the similarity between Debord’s concept of the spectacle and its

irrational injunction to action and Ellul’s concept of orthopraxy.

As opposed to previous years when the military relied on conscription, which

made the successful waging war more subject to public opinion and public support of

military engagements since most male citizens were also potential soldiers, the US

military in the post-Vietnam era relies on voluntary enrollments. Stahl (2010) explains

that this removes citizens from the direct negative consequences of military

engagements and thus brings an end to the era of the citizen-soldier, the citizen subjectivity typified by World War II propaganda which dismantled the boundaries between the frontline and the home front. The citizen-soldier was replaced by the citizen-spectator. The first Gulf War was the first real demonstration of this stage of evolution in the presentation and propaganda of war. The war’s video game quality was commented upon by many, and the spectacular nature of its media presentation prompted French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1991) to pen the essay “The Gulf War

Did Not Take Place”. Baudrillard’s argument is not that the Gulf War was an illusion or some kind of elaborate hoax. Rather, when he says that the Gulf War did not take place, he means that the spectacular nature of the war, the constant stream of images and information broadcast to television and radio, outstripped and eclipsed the actual experience of the war:

Since this war was won in advance, we will never know what it would have

been like had it existed. We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with

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a chance of fighting would have been like. We will never know what an

American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been

like...But this is not a war, any more than 10,000 tonnes of bombs per day

is sufficient to make it a war. Any more than the direct transmission by

CNN of real time information is sufficient to authenticate a war.

(Baudrillard, 1995, p. 53)

Baudrillard’s argument is that the incredible asymmetry of destructive power held by the Coalition forces (the US and its allies), combined with the desire of the Coalition to limit casualties on its side and a seeming unwillingness to actually destroy the war- making ability of Saddam Hussein—evidenced, in a famous instance, by the failure to stop Hussein’s massacre of Shia and Kurdish populations—precluded anything resembling an actual struggle between two opposing forces from taking place. The one- sided nature of the war was evidenced by battles such as the Battle of 73 Easting, in which the US 2nd Armored Division completely obliterated the Iraqi Republican Guards’

Tawakalna tank division while taking almost no casualties and dealing 600-1,000 casualties to the Iraqis. Baudrillard’s assessment of the war is echoed by Noam

Chomsky (1992), who said: “As I understand the concept of ‘war’, it involves two sides in combat, say shooting at each other. That did not happen in the Gulf” (p. 51).

As J.C. Herz explains, the Gulf War was a boon to the videogame industry.

Immediately following the conflict several companies released video games that were either based on or referenced the conflict. This convergence of the spectacular military conflict and the entertainment industry is not just a mere coincidence, as the two fields are intimately connected. On a more surface level, “Mainstream media

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commentary...registered the striking resemblance between the “missile cam” and spotter plane footage of targets being destroyed and the screens of contemporary combat-based video games” (Crogan, 2011, p. 1).

This is exactly what Baudrillard argued; the conflict—or at least the way it was presented—did not “feel” like a war. At the time, both the news media and the US military made much of the high technological level of the US weaponry; ordinance were described as “smart bombs” that were “surgical” in their precision when destroying enemy targets, presumably reducing or eliminating “collateral damage”. However;

The rhetoric of a war of precision weapons delivering surgical strikes obscured

the fact that the vast majority of military ordnance was not precision guided; that

area bombing was more prevalent than precision targeting; and that...many of

the “smart” weapons...were far less effective than was made out in the press

briefings. (Crogan, 2011, p. 1)

However, there were connections between the Gulf War, the military, and the videogame industry at a deeper level. The relationship between videogames and the

US military goes back to the beginnings of the former as a separate field of recreational entertainment and involves all levels, from funding to technological development.

Similar to the crucial involvement of the military in the birth and development of Silicon

Valley, the development of technology critical to video gaming, such as graphical displays and virtualization technology basically started in the US military. Discussing the importance of the SAGE (Semi-Automated Ground Environment) project to the development of computers and information technology, Patrick Crogan (2011) states;

“[SAGE] was one of, if not the, most important digital computer research and

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development projects in the 1950s–1960s” (p. 6). SAGE led to major advances in

computing technology such as innovations or improvements in, “Magnetic core memory, graphic display techniques, simulation techniques, digital data transmission over telephone lines, and computer networking”, all of which are necessary for computer gaming and online networked gaming (p. 7).

A two-way exchange exists in which the military provides funding and research for the early stages or prototypes of technology and said technology is then passed to private enterprises who develop consumer products from it. The transfer also works in reverse and there are many examples of consumer products being picked up by the military for its use. One of the best examples of the first type of transfer is Lockheed

Martin, America’s largest defense contractor. In 1993 GE Aerospace, whose technological pedigree extends back to the Visual Docking Simulator used for the Apollo lunar landings, was acquired by Martin Marietta (Bryant, 1992). In 1995 Martin Marietta merged with Lockheed to form Lockheed Martin (Lynch, 1994). Previously, GE

Aerospace was developing real-time 3D graphics technology, which in 1991 lead to a contract with SEGA Enterprises Ltd., then the largest manufacturer of arcade games in the world (Lenoir, 2000). Sega was looking for a way to improve the 3D graphics of their games and the partnership with GE Aerospace led to the implementation of GE

Aerospace’s technology in Sega’s famous Model 2 (1993) and Model 3 (1996) arcade gaming boards. When GE Aerospace was acquired by Martin Marietta, and later when

Martin Marietta merged with Lockheed, this relationship with Sega continued (Lenoir,

2000).

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In 1995 Lockheed Martin wanted to expand into other areas of the consumer market and established Real3D as a separate division to focus on developing consumer graphics products (Lenoir, 2000). Real3D produced the R3D/100 two-chip graphics engine, which was used in Sega’s Model 3 arcade board11. Sega also adapted a Martin

Marietta (Lockheed Martin) tank simulator for commercial release as the arcade game

Desert Tank (1994). In 1996 Real3D teamed up with Intel and Chips and Technologies,

Inc. to market Real3D's technology to the PC industry (Lenoir, 2000). Real3D was

eventually spun off into a separate company in 1997. The company continued to work

with Intel and Chips and Technologies but closed in 1999 and its assets were sold to

Intel. In addition to Real3D’s intellectual property, Intel inherited a pending lawsuit levied

against Real3D by 3dfx Interactive, producer of the popular “Voodoo Graphics” graphics

accelerator card. The lawsuit was settled when 3dfx agreed to cease legal action in

exchange for Real3D’s patents, for which in turn 3dfx would allow Intel access to its own

technology (Smith, 2000; Smith 2001). 3dfx later went bankrupt and was acquired by

rival NVidia.

It is also interesting to note that the Japanese arcade and video game company

Sega’s connection to the American military begin with the very origin of the company

(Plunkett, 2011). Sega originally started as an American business based in Hawaii, and

was originally called Service Games, a company founded by Marty Bromley which

provided coin-operated slot machines and other amusements to American military

bases. After slot machines were outlawed by the American government, Bromley took

advantage of America’s military presence in Japan and began to sell his slot machine

games there. In 1964 Service Games merged with Rosen Enterprises, a company

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founded in Japan during the aftermath of World War II by American David Rosen, a soldier in the US Air Force. After merger Service Games was renamed to SEGA

Enterprises Ltd.

As already mentioned, the flow of products and technology goes in the opposite direction as well, from the consumer entertainment goods sector back to the military.

Stahl (2006) explains how, beginning in the 90s, “As the commercial gaming market exploded, the military commissioned modified commercial games (mods) as quickly as they could be developed” (p. 117). One of the best examples is the classic first-person shooter Doom. Doom was modded by Marine Lieutenant Scott Barnett and Sergeant

Dan Snyder for use by the Marine Corps in training soldiers. The resulting game, Marine

Doom, was “Found to be successful in teaching repetitive decision-making on the ground,” and, “its 1997 introduction served as a prototype for the further military use of commercial first-person shooters (p. 117). Other commercial titles have been picked up by the military as well: “In 1999, the Navy used the commercial release of Fleet

Command by Jane’s Combat Simulations. In 2001, the Army commissioned Ubi Soft

Entertainment’s Tom Clancy’s Rogue Spear: Black Thorn for help in training soldiers to fight terrorists on urban terrain” (p. 117).

This cross-pollination between the US military and video game developers is more than an interesting historical footnote. The military’s involvement in the simulation of war and the virtualizing of reality signals a new stage of development in the citizen’s relationship to war. Whereas the Gulf War was the epitome of spectacular war, the involvement of the military in simulating reality marks the start of interactive war (Der

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Derian’s (2001) Virtuous War) and the birth of the subjectivity of the virtual citizen soldier:

The blurring of the lines between citizen and soldier initiates a ‘‘third sphere’’ of

cultural production. This third sphere is a symptom of the larger social

militarization, of the recoding of the social field with military values and ideals.

The new discursive universe gives birth to a hybrid identity, what I call the virtual

citizen-soldier. The virtual citizen-soldier is produced by the changing

configurations of electronic media, social institutions, and world events (Stahl,

2006, p. 125)

The movement from the spectacular to the virtual is a movement from the exterior of the subject to the interior of the individual. While the spectacle holds the audience transfixed and dumbfounded, neutralizing the capacity to rationally analyze the events flashing before their eyes, the new trend is to simulate reality and embed the audience within the simulation. However, the new reality is over-coded with the values and ideology of creators of that virtual world, allowing even greater influencing of the minds of the audience by controlling what they believe is “natural” or “real”. This is the most potent form of propaganda yet devised.

Once again, the world of videogames and entertainment media demonstrates the efficacy of this kind of propaganda strategy. The military and the entertainment industry have only strengthened the relationships detailed above. The military has realized the potential of video games, both for the training of soldiers, as in the example of Marine

Doom, and for the recruitment possibilities that games offer. Possibly the foremost

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example of the use of such games for recruitment is the US Army’s America’s Army video game franchise.

America’s Army

Released on July 4, 2002 (Independence Day), America’s Army is a videogame that was specifically developed by the Army for the purposes of recruitment. In the late

90s and early years of the new millennium the military’s recruitment was low overall and officials were searching for ways to increase enlistment without increasing cost. The inspiration for the development of America’s Army happened in 1999 when Army

Colonel Casey Wardynski noticed the popularity of military games while shopping with his sons. Wardynski was the director of the Army’s Office of Economic and Manpower

Analysis. Wardynski realized that such a game could help solve the Army’s recruitment problems and recommended that the Army develop a military-themed game for such a purpose (White, 2005). According to Wardynski and two co-authors of a military report, the game allows the Army to recruit soldiers “at a cost that is 10 to 40 times cheaper per person-hour of mindshare than traditional media” (Wardynski, Lyle, and Colarusso,

2010, p. 31). The game was designed to make players comfortable with considering the

Army as a possible career. Wardynski explains that, “[The Army wants] kids to come into the Army and feel like they've already been there”, and that the game is “designed to give them a sense of self-efficacy, that they can do it” by allowing them to experience what it’s like to be a soldier (White, 2005).

America’s Army is a squad-based game that was originally divided into two parts:

“Soldiers” and “Operations”. “Soldiers” gives players a chance to experience basic

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training as a new recruit. Players are given basic weapons training and are punished for mistakes like shooting a drill instructor by being sent to Fort Leavenworth (White, 2005).

“Operations” on the other hand, features combat missions, and an actual raid conducted in Afghanistan was the model for one of the early missions (Stahl, 2010).

In America’s Army, both teams play as Americans, although they see the opposing team as “terrorists”. Wardynski says that allowing players to play as terrorists would not give them the chance to experience the values of the US Army. The Army’s concerns about allowing players the chance to become terrorists are not baseless. The

2009 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 contains a mission in which an undercover CIA operative must participate in a massacre at an airport in order to gain the trust of a terrorist cell. The graphic mission immediately provoked criticism and backlash from those who thought that it promoted terrorism and gun violence (Stuart,

2009). Therefore, America’s Army is realistic, but not in any way that might damage the reputation of the Army or its recruitment efforts. This is also evident in the lack of realistic displays of violence or gore. Enemies when shot only emit a light, pink mist to indicate they are wounded, and when their bodies fall to the ground they disappear

(Stahl, 2010). This lack of overt displays of violence allowed the game to garner a T rating, suitable for players 13 years of age and older (Stahl, 2010).

Thus, America’s Army is a highly realistic game about the military and combat that nonetheless does not extend realism to the violence of war. This serves the Army’s financial, marketing, public relations, and recruitment purposes by allowing the game to be accessed by a wide audience who come to know the Army intimately, while also

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preventing that audience and potential recruits from associating negative experiences with the Army, which might negatively impact recruitment and public opinion.

Wardynski claims that the purpose of the game is not recruitment, but describes its function as one of communication and education. The colonel argues that the game simply shows the Army as a high tech and cool organization (Stahl, 2010). It should be remembered that the distinction between propaganda, marketing, public relations, and educational materials is incredibly murky, and even if Wardynski’s statements about the purposes of the game, evidence indicates that the game has had a positive impact on enlistment numbers (Stahl, 2010).

Despite the murkiness of the distinctions between the different strategies and purposes of molding and affecting public consciousness, the novelty and uniqueness of

America’s Army must be noted and examined. In keeping with the notion that propaganda these days has been empowered by virtuality and simulation by gaining the power to shape the audience’s experience of reality in a visceral way, it should be noted that, in contrast to past marketing, America’s Army does not make any kind of arguments or claims that can be held up to scrutiny by rationality. In fact, it might be better to say that the game itself is one, grand rhetorical act or process, whose purpose is to influence by means of affect and experience; what literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “identification”. Rather than appeal to logic, the game creates “an immersive cultural universe” which allows the player to learn about the Army and form positive associations and identifications with the organization (Stahl, 2010, p. 109).

It is this immersive rhetorical universe that makes America’s Army more than just an advergame, it is a “persuasive game”. In this sense, Wardynski was correct, the

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purpose of the game more than increasing enlistment, but helping players to accept the

“validity of [the] army’s worldview and operations” (Løvlie, 2008, p. 71). Borrowing the

Barthe’s concept of “anchoring”, Løvlie (2008) explains that the game’s above- mentioned adherence to the rules of the US Army, and the refusal to allow players to assume the role of terrorists, “are all ways of anchoring the game experience in a reality that the US Army wants the players to consider as their own: as potential US Army recruits” (p. 86). By “anchoring” the gameplay with rules from the real Army, the game gives an interpretative frame to the player’s experiences. The rhetoric of the game diverges from the overt style usually associated with propaganda and marketing and instead “is a rhetoric of modesty, responsibility, and moral authority; avoiding unrealistic excesses and rebellious play” (p. 86). “Modesty, responsibility, and moral authority while avoiding excesses” are the values and the image that the US Army wants to portray to the American public and the world, especially during a time when it is embroiled in unpopular wars in several foreign countries.

“Death from Above”

The fourth installment of the Call of Duty military shooter franchise, Modern

Warfare, demonstrates the extent to which the virtual has merged with the real, demonstrating prime example of what Der Derian (2009) calls “virtuous war” in which the “the production, representation, and execution of war” is “seamlessly merge[ed]” (p. xxxvi). Virtuous War:

projects a technological and ethical superiority in which computer simulation,

media ‘projects a technological and ethical superiority in which computer

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simulation, media dissimulation, global surveillance, and networked warfare

combine to deter, discipline, and if need be, destroy the enemy (Der Derian,

2009, xx)

Games like America’s Army and those in the Call of Duty franchise present what Stahl

(2010) calls “clean war”, which is “a manner of presenting war that maximizes viewer

alienation from the fact of death in order to maximize the war’s capacity to be

consumed” (p. 25).

This quality of clean war/virtuous war is on full display in one of Modern

Warfare’s most memorable missions, “Death from Above”. In this mission, the player

controls the guns of an AC-130 gunship. The AC-130 is a close-support aircraft that has

been in use by the US Air Force since the Vietnam War and exists in a variety of

configurations. During the early stages of the Gulf War II and Afghanistan wars the

Pentagon would release infrared gunsight footage from the AC-130 to news networks

(Stahl, 2010). The in-game mission is virtually indistinguishable from the AC-130 footage from Pentagon press releases and harkens back to the infrared missile sight footage from Gulf War I; “Through the greenish wash of a night vision camera lens you watch the luminous shapes of men on the ground running at full pelt for cover. It’s a scene as grimly and dispassionately realistic as any late-night news report” (Parkin,

2014). In fact, the in-game simulation was so lifelike that people visiting YouTube in search of footage of real AC-130’s were deceived by a player who had posted in-game video from the mission (Stahl, 2010).

The Death from Above mission is an example of Virtuous War, an instance when the virtual becomes real and the real becomes virtual. Not only does the game’s

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simulation look “queasily real”, but it “makes you realise [sic] that taking lives from the

comfort of a cockpit and using a flickering monitor can look weirdly like playing a video

game” (Edge Staff, 2017). Waging war from behind a screen resembles playing a video

game even more these days. The US Army has started to use the game controllers

from the Xbox 360 video game console to control robot drones and as an interface for

its new laser-based weapons (High Energy Laser), and the US Navy is using them for

submarine periscopes (Collins, 2014; Dransfield, 2014; Golson, 2014; & Grossman,

2017). The reasoning is that the today’s soldiers grow up using video game controllers

and are comfortable with them. The Navy wants to continue to incorporate technology

that young soldiers are familiar with and in the future, wants “to bring in sailors with what they have at home on their personal laptop, their personal desktop, what they grew up with in a classroom,” such as tablet-style touchscreens (Vergakis, 2017).

Already young soldiers who played Modern Warfare’s Death from Above mission

are using the very same controllers and taking out targets that appear on screen, from

thousands of miles away. This convergence of the experience of recreational video

games and actual war will only accelerate as drones take the place of manned aircraft

(Bumiller, 2012). Although real drone pilots say that what they do is not like a video

game, and although they are right, the technological similarities cannot be ignored. If

Modern Warfare’s Death from Above can come so close to mimicking real life would

gamers at home know the difference if they were secretly connected to real drones, a la

Ender’s Game?

Conclusion

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This chapter has sought to retrace the connections between the military, technology, media and entertainment, and war. The relationship between the military and the development of communications technology and mass media stretch back to the beginnings of broadcast technology and was one of mutual dependence. This relationship blurs the distinctions between entertainment, advertising, marketing, propaganda, and education such that “the techniques employed by propagandists, game developers, writers and filmmakers regularly overlap” (Power, 2007, p. 285).

With the advent of video games—especially those of the late-generation, graphically intense variety— the lines have blurred even further, to the point that the motives and prerogatives of the military can design games to encourage the formation of values, opinions, and worldviews by both affording the opportunity to take on new identities and constraining the ability to see the world from a different point-of-view:

Now the danger lies in the media’s power to ‘substitute’ realities. With the

appearance of a global view comes the disappearance of the viewer-

subject: in the immediacy of perception, our eyes become

indistinguishable from the camera’s optics, and critical consciousness,

along with the body, goes missing (Der Derian, 2001, p. 215)

Games like America’s Army and Call of Duty exemplify the birth of Stahl’s virtual citizen-soldier. The movement from the spectacular to the virtual is internally directed; both into the viewer and into the virtual world. Whereas the spectacle lies before the eyes of the audience, the virtual swallows the participant, immersing him in the spectacle itself. Audiences become a part of the spectacle and by the visceral

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experience of the game their opinions are shaped, they learn new skills, and emotionally align with the desired values of the game’s designers:

Many recent video war-game releases are not so much ‘realistic’ but cinematic,

in that they reproduce not the real-world experience of war but the theatrical

experience of war...As immersive/interactive movies about the experience of war,

they permit gamers to see themselves on screen as the noble hero, in the

Pentagon’s latest version of the noble war fantasy. Here, the player of the game

is the story (Power, 2007, p. 285)

Realistic, graphics-intensive video games may be more effective at cultivating opinions and patterns of thinking than other media such as television, cinema, and radio, because games mix several different media and engage the player’s vision, hearing, and physical responses. A study by Naomi Rokotnitz (2008) of both the theatrical and cinematic versions of Stephen Jeffrey’s 1994 play, The Libertine, examines “how preconscious neurological, visual, auditory, and motor circuits may be accessed and influenced in order to provoke both the sensation of physical disgust and the moral judgments of indignation and rejection” (p. 399). Rokotnitz uses recent research on mirror neurons and how “drama and cinema may maximize audiences’ conscious and unconscious mechanisms of simulation” (p. 406). Rokotnitz explains that mirror neurons are only activated by “goal-related behaviors”; in other words, a person’s mirror neurons can only be activated by witnessing the behaviors of other people which are understood as intentional or as bearing meaning.

In light of this recent neurological research the enhanced opportunities for

“provoking sensations of disgust and moral judgments” offered by realistic video games

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becomes apparent. For example, home video game consoles have been using controllers that have a “rumble feature” that gives physical feedback according to how the player’s character in the game moves or is hit for almost two decades. Thus, video games are a genre that has much greater propaganda potential than others.

One notable feature of the KONY 2012 video is that, in the same way that it borrows features of different genres of film like documentary and action, it borrows themes and visual cues from video games as well. For example, the part of the video that introduces viewers to Joseph Kony and the problems in Uganda looks very much like a mission briefing scene from a Call of Duty game, even down to mimicking the heads-up-displays (HUDs) filled with indecipherable information and numerical parameters. Watching the KONY video the similarities are uncanny, and it is apparent that military shooter video games and military action films affected the design and editing of the video. The fact that Invisible Children, the NGO that released the Kony video, stated that one of its goals was to convince the American government to send military forces to Uganda to assist in Kony’s capture make the similarities to recruitment advergames all the more real. KONY 2012 is a video that apes military shooter games, games which were in turn funded and developed with assistance by the US military.

When the video results in actual military assistance and “boots-on-the-ground” we have

“Mission Accomplished”.

This removal of any serious discussion of the possible violence and destruction that could occur as a result of military intervention makes the KONY 2012 video an example of Stahl’s (2010) concept of “clean war”; televised “clean war” removes all traces of what “anchors war to the moorings of the real” and it “eliminate[s] the body

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from the language of warfare through the mobilization of euphemism” (p. 26). KONY

2012 mixes its propaganda and emotional appeals with highly-polished entertainment with a cinematic quality. Most internet videos are unable to hold the attention of viewers for more than a few seconds, KONY 2012 was incredibly remarkable in that it is a video with a runtime of almost thirty minutes and it managed to garner 100 million views in a few weeks.

KONY 2012 was able to reach such levels of popularity and influence in our current environment of attenuated attention spans because it was entertaining and engaging, it drew viewers into its story with compelling characters, intelligent pacing, and polished visuals. But nowhere within this engaging media is there any hint of the consequences of American military involvement in Uganda. Even though the video is replete with images of suffering Ugandans and alludes to the violence of Kony’s LRA this is all rooted in long-standing tropes of African misery and poverty, not a true analysis and discussion of the consequences of military violence. KONY 2012 presents a sanitized version of US military involvement as an unequivocal force for good without examining the effects such involvement might have. That Invisible Children actually succeeded in their campaign to push the Obama administration to send “military advisors” to Uganda makes KONY 2012 an example of “clean war” entertainment.

Invisible Children’s activities were an integral factor in the passage of the 2010

Lord’s Resistance Army and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. Perhaps unwittingly, the organization had aided US military strategic designs for Africa. Prior to the turn of the millennium, Africa was not a priority for the US military; in 1995, the Department of

Defense declared that, “We see very little traditional strategic interest in Africa”

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(Thurston, 2010, p. 51). This started to change in 1998 after the Al Qaeda attacks on

US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The rise of China as an economic power and its search for fossil fuels to feed its economy also helped to draw the US military’s attention to Africa:

Chinese oil companies have already established a significant presence in

Sudan—the Chinese National Petroleum Company (CNPC) now owns 40

per cent of the largest oil-producing company in Sudan, the Great Nile

Petroleum Operating Company—and in January 2006, the Chinese state-

controlled energy company CNOOC announced a $2.3 billion deal to

acquire a 45 per cent stake in a major off-shore Nigerian oil field that is

managed by the French oil firm Total; China is avidly seeking investment

opportunities in Angola as well. According to Michael Rannenberger, the

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, China now obtains

approximately 30 per cent of its oil imports from Africa and 'China hopes to

increase this proportion in the years ahead. (Klare & Volman 2006, 304-

305)

In light of the changing geopolitical situation, the American government

and military began to shift focus to Africa. A 2011 congressional report stated

that “In recent years, analysts and U.S. policymakers have noted Africa’s growing

strategic importance to U.S. interests. Among those interests are the increasing

importance of Africa’s natural resources, particularly energy resources” (Ploch

2011, p. 1). The growing geostrategic importance of Africa after the initiation of

the War on Terror during the Bush Administration along with China’s rapidly

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increasing economic involvement on the continent prompted the Department of

Defense to create a new unified combatant command for Africa, AFRICOM

(Africa Command). Prior to the creation of AFRICOM, US military operations in

Africa were divided among three commands: US European Command (EUCOM),

US Central Command (CENTCOM), and US Pacific Command (PACOM). The creation of a dedicated combatant command signaled Africa’s growing importance to the US military.

Contrary to their stated aims, Invisible Children’s promotion of legislation authorizing military involvement in Uganda will most likely worsen the situation in the country, rather than improve it since “the net effect of AFRICOM is a militarization of the U.S. presence in Africa, of African states, and of African societies,” since, “The expansion of the military becomes an end in itself, which can be deployed in the service of any of a number of agendas” (Branch, 2011, p.

224). Once the military “genie” is released from the proverbial bottle, the damage that can result will be difficult to predict and impossible to reverse.

Indeed, even before the KONY 2012 campaign, in December 2008, the

US military supported Ugandan forces in an operation whose purpose was the capture of Joseph Kony and destroy the LRA (Gettleman and Schmitt, 2009).

The attack, called Operation Lightning Thunder, was a failure. Kony and his army escaped into northeastern Congo and neighboring nations, attacking villages and massacring the local population (Rice, 2009).

Northern Ugandans were aware of the outcome of the failed operation. Although there is no mention of this in the KONY 2012 video, the people of northern Uganda

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have been heavily invested for years in bringing the conflict between the LRA and the

Ugandan military to a close. In 2010 a group of religious leaders from the northern

Ugandan ethnic group the Acholi sent two representatives to Washington, DC to advocate for a peaceful, nonviolent solution to the conflict. The group, the Acholi

Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative (ARLPI) released a statement at the time:

Almost two years have passed since the collapse of the Juba Peace talks

resulting from the launching of a regional military offensive known as, [sic]

“Operation Lightning Thunder” in December of 2008...Rather than containing the

conflict, this offensive [,] like the ones before it [,] caused the LRA to flee to other

regions in the Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Central African

Republic [,] where [,] to this day, attacks against the civilian population continue

unabated.

As individuals who have been laboring for sustainable peace in the

region [,] we, the Acholi Religious Leaders, are greatly concerned with the

plight of those suffering as a result of the continued violence. As the peace

talks were the closest the region has come to ending the war, we are

calling on all actors to desist from hostilities, prioritize civilian protection,

and engage in a transformed regional approach to ending the conflict that

is based on the pillars of non-violence and dialogue. (Acholi Religious

Leaders Peace Initiative, 2010)

The sentiments of the ARLPI were echoed by other northern Ugandans interviewed by Finnegan (2013b) during eight months of ethnographic research between September 2009 and May 2010. One of the interviewees, a peace

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advocate named Santo said that the proposed LRA bill would not be appropriate

“As long as it emphasizes [a] military approach,” and pointed out that even with

all of the bombing during Operation Lightning Thunder the LRA was left

unscathed (Finnegan, 2013b, p. 156). Finnegan also interviewed a man named

Kevin who is a former Invisible Children employee. Kevin wondered about the

LRA bill:

Is that [in] the interest of northern Uganda or the interest of the

organization Resolve Uganda [one of Invisible Children’s partner NGOs]

and the rest? Certainly, there is no way you can say the military option is

[in] the interest of northern Uganda…They are just playing around with

partly our interests and putting their interests at [sic] play as well”

(Finnegan, 2013b, p. 157)

Unfortunately, Invisible Children gave the opinions of Ugandans like the ARLPI,

Santo, and Kevin no chance to be heard in the KONY 2012 video. Military aid has not improved the situation and as of 2017, the United States has spent almost $800 million in the effort to capture or kill Joseph Kony and the LRA has now spread throughout the

Central African Republic, South Sudan, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, though their numbers are reportedly severely diminished (Cooper, 2017).

The next chapter will examine how Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 campaign

was not an isolated event but rather it was the product of discourses about new

techniques of governance that came from the US Department of State. In both its tactics

and aesthetics KONY 2012 resembled other youth-led, seemingly spontaneous political

movements that erupted around the time of the campaign.

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CHAPTER 5: THE INTEGRATED SPECTACLE: MANUFACTURING DISSENT WITH

NETWORKS AND PROPAGANDA

Our product is a lifestyle…The movement isn’t about the issues. It’s about my

identity. We’re trying to make politics sexy (Rosenberg, 2011)

Branding is propaganda...what it boils down to is manipulation and seduction.

That’s the business we’re in. That’s the business of life (Jansen, 2008, p. 135)

This chapter will argue that the KONY 2012 video is an example of new propaganda by examining the institutional complex from which it arose and the relationships of its creators to that complex. I will attempt to demonstrate that, despite the much-vaunted potential of Web 2.0, social-networking technologies to empower individuals and to challenge traditional centralized hierarchies, these same technologies can work in the other direction in order to maintain and extend systems of control and domination. Much has been made of late of “network economies”; “peer production”;

“the sharing economy”; “assemblages”; and “multiplicitous”, “heterogeneous”,

“distributed”, “rhizomatic”, networks. The argument of this chapter is not that these concepts are inherently flawed or have no practical utility or that they will not bring actual benefits; rather, the argument presented here is that too much attention has been paid to how these techniques and modes of organization are liberatory and not enough has been given to how they can work against liberation.

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Proponents of the above enumerated concepts describe those concepts in dichotomous terms; centralized governments and the like represent the “bad old way of doing things”, and the new distributed networks represent a qualitatively “better” and inevitable future. To think that oppression cannot occur within a distributed network, or that such networks cannot be used in the service of power is mistaken. Systems adapt.

Systems are resilient. Systems are dynamic. There is no reason to believe that new techniques and modes of organization cannot be used by traditional centers of power and there is much evidence to suggest that this is indeed happening.

Today, decentralized and distributed networks can be used to foster Ellul’s orthopraxy, the unthinking “right action” of a politically significant segment of the population. The internet and social media allow propagandists to penetrate into social groups and relationships, delivering branded content with a message that bypasses the rational and critical faculties of the targets and works at an emotional level.

In this chapter the KONY 2012 and Invisible Children, the NGO that created and disseminated the video, will be compared to another political intervention that focused on social media and culture, “Zunzuneo”, a Twitter-like messaging app that was created for the Cuban market by USAID. Zunzuneo will be examined against the backdrop of other related attempts by the US to manipulate Cuban culture—one, a scheme targeting the Cuban Hip-Hop community, and other, which involved transporting youth from other

Latin American nations into Cuba to foment civil unrest—and by comparison to similar interventions in North Africa and the Balkans. KONY 2012 and these other interventions will be examined from the aspect of the individuals and organizations that designed and

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implemented them. The chapter will argue that KONY 2012 is propaganda in that it is an instance of what Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993) call “Netwar”.

Netwar

While the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri is widely recognized as being a landmark in the theorizing of the political importance and revolutionary potential of networks, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, two analysts working for the RAND

Corporation, beat them to the punch by several years. Once again, the military was at the cutting edge, not only of technology but this time of post-modern social theory. In the early 1990’s, changes in technology, communications, and geopolitics led to a new

Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), “a new era of warfare dominated by the American military's mastery of the conventional battlefield” (Hoffman, 1995, p. 366). The new era was effectively demonstrated by the US performance in Gulf War I in which the US completely dominated Iraqi forces. However, military strategists realized that “the revolution [would] have little if any impact on American military capabilities so far as countering terrorism, insurgency, or guerrilla warfare are concerned” and American experiences in situations like the problems the US encountered in Somalia underscored the need to prepare for those new forms of asymmetrical conflict (Hoffman, 1995, p.

367).

Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993) analyzed the new situation and foretold changes in global struggles, military and otherwise, that would require a turn away from orthodox paradigms and solutions. They posited the birth of what they called “Netwar” as the

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future to which military affairs were headed. In a seminal policy paper for the RAND

Corporation, they described netwar as:

Information-related conflict at a grand level between nations or societies. It

means trying to disrupt, damage, or modify what a target population

“knows” or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it. A netwar

may focus on public or elite opinion, or both. It may involve public

diplomacy measures, propaganda and psychological campaigns, political

and cultural subversion, deception of or interference with local media,

infiltration of computer networks and databases, and efforts to promote a

dissident or opposition movements across computer networks. Thus,

designing a strategy for netwar may mean grouping together from a new

perspective a number of measures that have been used before but were

viewed separately (p. 144)

In other words, netwar represents a new entry on the spectrum of conflict that spans economic, political, and social as well as military forms of “war.” In contrast to economic wars that target the production and distribution of goods, and political wars that aim at the leadership and institutions of a government, netwars would be distinguished by their targeting of information and communications. Like other forms on this spectrum, netwars would be largely nonmilitary, but they could have dimensions that overlap into military war.

Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993) reach a conclusion about the struggle between networks and traditional organizational structures within the realm of military affairs:

“Institutions can be defeated by networks. It may take networks to counter networks.

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The future may belong to whoever masters the network form” (p. 40). Arquilla and

Ronfeldt’s recommendations did not go ignored, indeed, they mentioned that the US was already locked in a netwar with Cuba

In some respects, the U.S. and Cuban governments are already engaged in a

netwar. This is manifested in the activities of Radio and TV Marti on the U.S.

side, and on Castro's side by the activities of pro-Cuban support networks around

the world (p. 145)

The KONY 2012 and Zunzuneo interventions are examples of netwar put into action,

the difference being that the latter was netwar directed outward, while the KONY 2012

campaign was netwar directed internally, with the intent of leading to some military

effect in a foreign nation. In other words, these were examples of networks being

mobilized against other networks.

The Integrated Spectacle

The concept of netwar has such utility because it is multidimensional, including

communications, media, politics, and military and the way that these factors are

influenced by new, decentralized networked forms of organization. There is a felicitous

congruence between the three types of networks and the three types of “spectacle”

theorized by the French Situationist Guy Debord. Baran (1964), in his RAND

corporation-funded memorandum, On Distributed Communications: Introduction to

Distributed Communications Networks, identified the three types of networks:

centralized, decentralized, and distributed. A centralized network is formed when there

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exist a central node and an array of terminal “client nodes”, each connected to the central node but not to each other. A decentralized network exists when there are several central nodes, connected to each other, with each central node connected to its own sub-network of client nodes. A distributed network exists when both the central nodes and the client nodes in the subnetworks have many connections between each other; client to client, client to central node, and central node-to-central node.

Debord (1998) posits three types of spectacular power: the concentrated, the diffuse, and the integrated. The concentrated spectacle gives rise to totalitarian governments such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, while the diffuse spectacle is exemplified by post-war American consumer culture (p. 8). Debord said that the integrated spectacle, the third form, has “tended to impose itself globally” (p. 8). Debord explained that the integrated spectacle “shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse,” and that, “the controlling centre has now become occult: never to be occupied by a known leader, or a clear ideology” (p. 9). Therefore, in terms of types of networks, the concentrated spectacle corresponds to a centralized network, the diffuse spectacle corresponds to a decentralized network, and the integrated spectacle corresponds to a distributed network. Such is the power of the integrated spectacle that

Debord says of it; “When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part” (p. 9).

The concept of the “occult” controlling center is important. Apparently, the original title of one of Debord’s last works, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, was

“Treatise on Secrets” (Bratich, 2007). Debord preemptively and astutely recognizes something about distributed networks which most contemporary commentators miss; he

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realized that simply because such networks lack an overt control center this does not mean that control is not being exerted. That control is simply “occult” and this very secrecy is aided by the diffuse nature of exchanges within such distributed networks.

The “Third Sector” and Democracy

In liberal capitalist democracies, according to the standard view, power is located in two distinct fields; either in the formal structures of government, or the elite power located in the private sector. In the age of neoliberal drives for privatization, the debates about whether the private sector or the state can more efficiently provide services such as education or healthcare are perennial. However, such discussions begin from a false dichotomy, namely, the idea that the state and private sector are mutually exclusive entities and effectively different. Under such a view, the formal differences between the two sectors are more important than whatever practical effects each has on society, preventing any analysis of how the state can use private forms to govern and how the private sector increasingly carries out functions traditionally considered the preserve of the state, such as security and policing. The strict dichotomy also usually focuses on either centralized, bureaucratic, state institutions or private, profit-making, corporate enterprises, leaving out many important institutions that wield power and affect society, such as churches and cultural organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), government sponsored enterprises, quasi-nongovernmental organizations, private charitable foundations, think tanks, and various types of “public-private partnerships”.

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Such entities of the type listed above form a “third sector” of power and governance in liberal democratic societies. This third sector includes what is usually called the “nonprofit sector”, which includes churches, private educational institutions, charities, foundations, and the tax-exempt organizations covered by section 501 (c) (3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. In neoliberal capitalist societies this sector functions largely as what Roelofs (2003) calls a “protective layer for capitalism” (p. 22).

Despite its many charitable endeavors, the nonprofit sector is effectively “a system of power which is exercised in the interest of the corporate world” (Roelofs, 1995, p. 17).

Private foundations, such as the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations, perform this function by providing unprofitable services to the public, such as cultural activities or charitable services; providing work and creative outlets for intellectuals who may otherwise become radicalized; and by keeping activists and intellectuals busy with work in organizations that do not offer the employment guarantees and benefits of state- sector work and which depend almost fully on support from foundations for their survival. Essentially, the mostly tax-exempt nonprofit sector and foundations are a parallel locus of governance alongside the official state apparatus. In fact, the nonprofit sector and the big foundations should not be considered in isolation from each other, since members of the same elite class fill the ranks of both government and the leadership of the foundations.

One of the ways that the private foundations maintain social stability and preserve the status quo is by funding scholarship and research, sometime creating whole disciplines. Berndtson (2007) explains that, in their drive to understand the mind

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of the public in order to facilitate social-engineering, charitable foundations supported social scientific research, and that,

It can even be argued that the whole disciplinary system in the social sciences

was created by the Rockefeller funding he first President of the University,

William Rainey Harper, initiated a new disciplinary system, which was

enormously influential. It led to the formation of the departmental structure of the

American university, which was internationally unique (p. 583)

According to Parmar (2015), the foundations and the scholarship they funded worked to govern social change, such as the global movement towards decolonization that erupted after World War II:

Foundations facilitated the penetration of liberal American concepts of law,

property, and social order throughout the world by cultivating networks of

Western-educated elites in numerous countries. By funding academic work in

area studies, political science, economics, and sociology, the big foundations

created intellectual hubs radiating influence well beyond their immediate locales.

Such networks were established in strategically important countries...where a

small group of scholars favoring Western- style modernization over nationalist

development could influence doctoral students in the region. They would, in turn,

train thousands of other teachers (p. 679)

Domestically, the foundations sought to manage the social change brought about by the

Civil Rights and Black Power movements which were influenced by the global decolonization phenomenon. The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations supported and funded black Civil Rights groups, but their support was strategic:

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Foundation support for the civil rights movement was directed toward more

conservative (or “moderate”) organizations, sidelining more radical and even

revolutionary organizations, which were responsible for more of the actions and

direction of the civil rights and larger black liberation (or black power) movement

(Marshall, 2015, p. 776)

There are other third sector entities which do not have their beginnings in the private sector, but which come from the state. In the United States there are a number of quasi-autonomous-non-governmental-organizations (QUANGOs) which have been created by federal legislation and are mostly or partly funded by the government. This group includes NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), The

National Democratic Institute (NDI), and The International Republican Institute (IRI).

These organizations were created in the 1980s as a part of the Reagan administration’s agenda to combat the Soviet Union by, “foster[ing] the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means” (The Heritage Foundation, 2012)12. The Reagan administration planned to do this by founding several autonomous, government-funded organizations for “democracy promotion”. These organizations were to be built on the model of the West German stiftungen13; non-governmental organizations that were each tied to one of (then) West Germany’s political parties and received funding from the West German treasury. The stiftungen had been involved in democracy promotion

12 https://www.heritage.org/europe/report/20-years-later-reagans-westminster-speech 13 https://www.ned.org/about/history/#1

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work outside of Germany since the 1960s (Lowe, n.d.). Provisions for the establishment

and funding of the NED were made in P.L. 98-164, which became law in 1983. Soon

after the creation of the NED, four other affiliated organizations were created: the

Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), The National Democratic Institute

(NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the Free Trade Union Institute

(later organized as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, ACILS). The

NED was to “serve as the umbrella organization through which these four groups and

an expanding number of other private sector groups would receive funding to carry out

programs abroad” (Lowe, n.d.). Each of the four subsequent foundations are affiliated

with important institutions or organizations within American politics; the NDI is affiliated

with the Democratic Party, the IRI is affiliated with the Republican Party, the CIPE is

affiliated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the ACILS (now called the Solidarity

Center) is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.14

Despite President Reagan’s lofty rhetoric, the real purpose of his push for

democracy promotion was “to restore by subtler means the aggressive imperial

prerogatives exercised during the Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon years”

(Sussman, 2010, p. 44). In fact, the NED, like the NDI and IRI, was intended “to serve

similar purposes to, but avoid the stigma of, the CIA and designed to be a semi- autonomous, semi-private overseas ‘democracy promotion’ instrument of the U.S.

government” (Sussman, 2010, p. 45). Indeed, the first acting president and co-founder

of the NED, Allen Weinstein, has said that, “a lot of what we [NED] do today was done

14 Ignatius (1991) comments on the “democracy promotion” activities of the AFL-CIO: “Working mostly in the open, it helped keep the Polish trade union Solidarity alive in the dark days of martial law during the early 1980s…American trade unions and the U.S. Congress provided millions of dollars to the Solidarity underground”. 171

covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” (Ignatius, 1991). The NED and its affiliates are able to do this kind of work—such funding political opposition groups in foreign nations and supporting the production of propaganda materials such as television and radio programs for foreign markets—because, although they receive most of their funding from the federal government, they are nominally autonomous and do not have to report on their activities as much USAID and other formal branches of the government.

In fact, the creation of the NED, CIPE, NDI, IRI, and related foundations as part of President Reagan’s democracy promotion agenda was a shift in the tactics used to promote U.S. global interests from the covert actions of the likes of the CIA to overt actions. By being overt and public, the activities of organizations such as the NED gain a veneer of legitimacy, whereas the covert actions of the CIA drew public scorn during the Vietnam War Era and the “dirty wars” and Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. Ignatius

(1991) calls the NED the “sugar daddy of overt operations” and posits that, “The old concept of covert action, which has gotten the agency into such trouble during the past

40 years, may be obsolete. Nowadays, sensible activities to support America's friends abroad (or undermine its enemies) are probably best done openly”. According to

Ignatius (1991), the NED was very active in the Soviet Union during its last days, and also in other Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe during the same period. Praising the NED’s methods, he adds, “Covert funding for these groups would have been the kiss of death...Overt funding, it would seem, has been a kiss of life”.

In the original legislation which contained the proposal for the NED, H.R. 2915, funding for the foundation would come from the United States Information Agency

(USIA). Later, the NED would act as a kind of clearinghouse for the NDI, IRI, CIPE, and

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Solidarity Center, who receive their funding through grants from the NED. The USIA was founded in 1953 and was, in the words of Charles Z. Wick, director of agency during the Reagan administration, “America's arsenal in the war of Ideas” (Wick, 1985, p. 16). The agency descended from the World War II Era Office of War Information

(OWI) and other propaganda agencies created during the Truman Administration such as the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs, and the United States

International Information Administration (Guth, 2002). These disparate agencies were consolidated during the Eisenhower administration into the USIA, whose purpose was to, “to submit evidence to peoples of other nations by means of communication techniques that the objectives and policies of the United States are in harmony with and will advance their legitimate aspirations for freedom, progress and peace” (Wang, 2007, p. 25). In other words, the purpose of the agency was to produce propaganda targeted at foreign populations that would convince them to equate America’s foreign policy goals with their own well-being. This type of propaganda was in large part pioneered by the USIA and is called “public diplomacy”. According to Culbert (2010), public diplomacy is, “a form of diplomacy that goes beyond what one government official says to another—it is intended, often, to influence foreign publics, and is generally indirect in its effects,” that would have been “unthinkable” as a diplomatic practice before the

1980s (p. 422). The USIA was dissolved in 1999 during the Clinton administration and its duties and activities devolved to other agencies such as the Broadcasting Board of

Governors (BBG), which oversees U.S. government-funded broadcasters such as

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Marti, and Radio Free Asia.

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These entities are not monolithic. The NDI and IRI, for example, are affiliated

with the U.S. Democratic Party and Republican Party, respectively. Accordingly, each

espouses a more “liberal” or “conservative” worldview—within the comparatively narrow

political spectrum that exists in the United States—and their activities reflect this.

Another example, different from the semi-autonomous NDI and IRI, The Center for

American Progress (CAP), is a liberal think tank founded by John Podesta, former Chief

of Staff under President Clinton and Counselor under President Obama. The CAP

receives donations from a number of private foundations15 such as the Ford

Foundation, the Sandler Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

George Soros’ Open Society Foundation is also a key supporter (Blumenfeld, 2003).

The CAP’s sister organization, the Center for American Progress Action Fund is the

advocacy organization that houses the blog ThinkProgress, which is an “in-house full-

fledged, ideologically driven news organization” that works to counter the conservative

media messages of think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and right-wing blogs like

The Daily Caller (Smith & Vogel, 2011).

The leadership of President Obama’s transition team in 2008 was pulled from the

CAP, and the think tank produced a public policy manuscript, Change for America: A

Progressive Blueprint For the 44th President, offering suggestions for Obama’s administration (Scherer, 2008). In 2007, a member of the CAP, Gayle Smith, and a member of another think tank, the International Crisis Group, created the Enough

Project, “In response to a lack of organized public constituency to respond to deadly conflicts and mass atrocities in East and Central Africa”.16 The Enough Project

15 https://www.americanprogress.org/c3-our-supporters/ 16 https://enoughproject.org/about 174

partnered with the NGO, Invisible Children, for their KONY 2012 campaign and to raise awareness of the activities of the LRA in Northern Uganda.

There are many other such NGOs and think tanks founded by individuals within government or private industry, and many of these have links to the government-funded

NGOs like NED or the two major American political parties. Though there are conflicts among the members of these various entities over key ideological points, they operate within an ideological framework of US global hegemony and support for the spread of liberal democracy and, perhaps most important, free markets. For example, the NDI openly admits to supporting opposition parties and civil society groups in Serbia in an effort to oppose former president Milosevic and the “Centralized governance structures

[that] have held Serbia back in terms of making its political system fully open and participatory;” the NDI “started its Serbia program in 1996…and supported opposition parties and civil society groups…in defeating Milosevic at the ballot box”.17

To draw attention to the power and influence of these organizations is no exercise in “conspiracy theory”. One does not need to subscribe to a belief in a world controlled by a cabal of shadowy figures, gathered together in smoke-filled rooms, colluding to oppress the peoples of the world in order to realize that these third sector entities form a massive diffused network that is an integral part of maintaining America's global power. This network is a feature of the system, not some aberration; it is a manifestation of a type of governance structure that cannot be reduced to “government” in the traditional sense, but rather is a governance structure; as such, it produces new forms of propaganda for the control of opinions and the promotion of certain behaviors.

As an extension of American primacy, the propaganda produced by this network

17 https://www.ndi.org/central-and-eastern-europe/serbia 175

promotes what Ellul (1965) called “orthopraxy”; “an action that in itself...leads directly to a goal, which for the individual is not a conscious and intentional objective to be attained, but which is considered such by the propagandist” (p. 22).

Zunzuneo, Otpor!, and Youth Movements Mobilized as a Political Weapon

US government clandestine or covert “democracy promotion” (regime change) programs in foreign nations are a clear example of the occult nature of power within decentralized and distributed networks.18 One example of such covert activity with special relevance to the KONY 2012 campaign is the group of covert actions the US targeted against Cuba during the same time as the Kony campaign was starting. There are three different campaigns of interest here, but chief among these is the creation of

Zunzuneo, a Twitter-like messaging service developed by The United States Agency for

International Development (USAID) for the Cuban market. The word “Zunzuneo” refers to a colloquial name for the sound made by the Cuban hummingbird. Zunzuneo is most relevant to KONY 2012 because of the use of social networking technology as a political weapon, however, the other two examples also demonstrate the use of culture as a political weapon and the covert workings of distributed networks.

The existence of Zunzuneo was revealed by an Associated Press investigation, published on April 4, 2014 by Butler, Gillum, and Arce. The program was launched shortly after the 2009 arrest by Cuban authorities of Alan Gross, a contractor hired by

18 A covert action is specifically defined in US Law. A covert action is not merely any secret government activity and there are government restrictions. First, covert actions must be approved by the President and must be reported to the Congressional intelligence committees and the Speaker of the House and minority leader, and the majority and minority leaders in the Senate. See: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3093 176

USAID for another clandestine program that sought to expand internet access to

Cubans using “sensitive technology”. The purpose of Zunzuneo was to build up a user

base of mostly young Cubans through “non-controversial content” until a critical mass

was reached, after which political messages critical of the Cuban government would be

disseminated through the network with the goal of instigating spontaneous “smart mobs”

and protests against the government. USAID staff referenced the role played by text

messages and social media in the protest movements in Moldova, Egypt’s Tahrir

Square, and Iran’s “Green Revolution”. The aim was to “renegotiate the balance of

power between the state and society”.

The service was built through a shadowy network of shell companies located in various countries and financed by a foreign bank. USAID contracted with Creative

Associates International, a for-profit, Washington, D.C.-based company that has made

millions from federal contracts. Creative Associates obtained a list of Cuban phone

numbers from a “key contact” at Cubacel, the state-owned Cuban cellphone provider.

Noy Villalobos, a Creative Associates employee received assistance from her brother,

Mario Bernheim, who was then working for a technology company in Nicaragua.

Villalobos wanted to know if it would be possible to encrypt mass text messages and

hide the contents of the messages from surveillance. Bernheim advised her that hiding

the messages from surveillance would not be possible but by sending the messages

from mirrored computers located in various nations the identity of the sender could be

masked (Butler, Gillum, & Arce, 2014).

As the project began to grow it was obvious that Bernheim’s company was not

“sophisticated enough” to properly build and maintain a Twitter-like service, so USAID

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contracted with Denver-Based tech company Mobile Accord to manage the project. To

cover their tracks the agency found a UK company that was able to set up a corporation

in Spain to run Zunzuneo. To handle the expenses, a separate company called

MovilChat was created in the Cayman Islands. Eberhard and USAID sought to recruit a

CEO and management team for the company but did not reveal the true nature of the

service to them.

Around the same time as the Zunzuneo program was underway, USAID was supporting other schemes to undermine Cuba’s government. One scheme involved sending Latin American youth to Cuba under the guise of tourists or students interested

in teaching HIV prevention. Another involved infiltration of Cuba’s Hip-Hop movement to

destabilize the government. Creative Associates was involved in both of these

schemes.

The Youth sent to Cuba came from Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Peru. The

program lasted two years and was operated from a base in Costa Rica. Some of the

youth were sent to Cuba under the cover of teaching HIV prevention workshops and

other teams were sent to Cuban university campuses with the mission to recruit

students “with the long-term goal of turning them against their government”. In a statement USAID claimed that the purpose of the HIV workshop was to enable “support

for Cuban civil society while providing a secondary benefit of training in HIV prevention”

(Butler, Gillum, & Arce, 2014). However, documents show that the purpose of the

workshop was to identify “potential social change actors,” and one of the Venezuelan

youth, Fernando Murillo, wrote a six-page report to Creative Associates and mentioned

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HIV only once, noting that HIV prevention furnished the “perfect excuse for treatment of the underlying theme” (Butler, Gillum, & Arce, 2014).

The teams sent to universities used the “cover story” that they were going to

Cuba to visit friends. Teams of Venezuelan and Peruvian students visited dorms and students at a University in Santa Clara and kept detailed files on them. They identified student complaints and assessed the leadership qualities of potential recruits. The

Venezuelan team identified a group of 30 students who possessed the requisite organizational capabilities to “rebel against the government”. The targeted Cuban students were unaware of the true intentions of Venezuelan and Peruvian youth who visited them and considered them simply as friends.

Concurrently with the previous two programs, USAID was operating a program to infiltrate the Cuban Hip-Hop community, starting in 2009. The “mastermind” of this program was Xavier Utset, a veteran of anti-Castro protest movements who at the time worked for Creative Associates. The Cuban hip-hop program was run by Rajko Bozic, a

Serbian music promoter, and the scheme was inspired by the youth movements that helped to oust Slobodan Milosevic. A front company called Salida was set up by

Creative Associates and based in Panama.

Bozic target a rapper named Aldo Rodriguez and his group, Los Aldeanos, who were one of the most popular Cuban hip-hop groups at the time. Bozic’s goal was to build “youth networks for social change” and he promised to help Aldo and his group create a TV project that would feature the group and that would be distributed throughout the Cuban underground scene on DVDs and thumb drives. Creative

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Associates had determined that Cuba was not ready for a revolution and planned for the operation to last at least a decade.

Creative and Bozic planned to co-opt famous Cuban and Latin American musicians, such as Cuban nueva trova legends Silvio Rodriguez, Pablo Milanes, and

Colombian rock star Juanes. Creative and Xavier Utset planned to convince Los

Aldeanos to join Juanes on stage during a planned concert in Cuba. In order to judge the potential impact of such an appearance Creative Associates used Zunzuneo to administer a poll asking Cubans whether Los Aldeanos should join Juanes at the concert. Juanes declined to perform on stage with the group but he thanked them after his performance and he met with them at a hotel after the concert. During this meeting pictures were taken with Juanes, Aldo and one of his friends, and Silvito Rodriguez, the son of Silvio Rodriguez. The group’s manager, Melisa Riviere, claimed that the acknowledgment at the concert gave Los Aldeanos “unprecedented prominence” in

Cuba.

Only one Cuban knew the true purposes behind Bozic and his involvement in the

Cuban hip-hop scene, a Cuban video jockey named Adrien Monzon, a “contact of highest confidence”. After Bozic was detained when trying to enter Cuba and his equipment and hard drives were confiscated, he ceased all plans to return to the country. Monzon took over leadership of the operation and located 200 “socially conscious youth” and connected them on a site called Talentocubano.org. In January

2010 Monzon went to Europe along with some young musicians from Talento Cubano for “leadership training” for cultivating activists. In July 2010, Los Aldeanos travelled to

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Serbia to perform at the popular EXIT Festival; the rappers received similar training while there.

As evidence of how opaque and covert the USAID Cuba programs were, when

Bozic attempted to wire $15,000 to Cuba in order to help Monzon’s Talento Cubano infiltrate an art and music festival organized by the family of Cuban nueva trova musician Pablo Milanes, the US Treasury Department froze the transaction. Los

Aldeanos performed at Cuba’s Rotilla Festival in August 2010. Rotilla is a three day electronic music festival and is the country’s largest independent music festival. During their performance Los Aldeanos harshly criticized the Cuban government and the police forces. Rotilla Festival had been supported financially since 2006 by Bozic and EXIT

Festival and it grew immensely during that time. The founder of Rotilla, Michel Matos, expressed shock and surprise that the Serbians were working for USAID and said that he would never knowingly accept financial support from an organization working for the

USA.

In the end, USAID’s plan to use hip-hop to cultivate anti-Castro youth for revolution against the Cuban government failed. Bozic moved onto other projects in

Tunisia, Ukraine, Lebanon, and Zimbabwe. Adrian Monzon moved to Miami and started working at a Papa John’s pizzeria. Aldo was unable to make a living as a rapper and the

Cuban hip-hop scene began to fade since that time. Xavier Utset left Creative

Associates and took a position working for USAID.

The Serbian Connection

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Although the USAID schemes to subvert Cuba’s government were criticized

harshly once the AP broke the story—Senator Patrick Leahy called the Zunzuneo scheme “dumb, dumb, dumb”—the end of those programs was not the last time nor the first that an American agency would attempt to use social media technology and popular culture as weapons to sabotage unpopular foreign regimes (Butler, Gillum, & Arce,

2014). After the end of Zunzuneo the United States Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB)

started its own Zunzuneo-like program called Piramideo (Pyramid).19 The USAID

schemes in Cuba were predated by decades of US psychological warfare operations

targeting that nation. The OCB, which oversees Piramideo, also directs Radio Marti and

TV Marti, formerly called Radio Free Cuba, which is a radio broadcaster modeled on

Radio Free Europe from the Cold War Era. These two broadcasters create anti-

Castro/anti-communist programming targeted at the Cuban population with the goal of

stoking dissatisfaction with the Cuban government and political unrest. They are direct

predecessors of Zunzuneo and Piramideo.

Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993) refer to Radio y TV Marti in their article as an

example of Netwar. These two broadcasters are just two entities within a global web of

US agencies that exist to carry out psychological warfare and netwar against regimes

that the United States considers inimical or unfavorable. Radio and TV Marti are

governed by the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), which is governed by the

Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), and independent agency of the US

government. Other broadcasters that exist within the IBB are Voice of America (VOA),

Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Middle East Broadcasting

Networks, which oversees Arabic language broadcasters AlHurra and Radio Sawa

19 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-groundtruth-project/us-funding-another-social_b_5599147.html 182

(Levine, 2015). Together these broadcasters make up one section of a global

propaganda network used for perception management and netwar.

The case of USAID’s programs in Cuba has connections to previous US activity

in the Balkans. It is no accident that the Serbians Rajko Bozic and Bojan Boskovic were

involved in these Cuban programs. In Post-Cold War Serbia the US used similar programs to support the youth movement, Otpor! (Resistance), that led to the ouster of

Slobodan Milosevic.

Otpor was a protest movement founded by a group of Serbian students on

October 10, 1998 in Belgrade, by participants of the previous, failed student protests of

1996 (Cohen, 2000). The movement used nonviolent means to criticize Milosevic’s

administration; for example, in one stunt members painted Milosevic’s face on a barrel

and rolled it down a street, if passers-by inserted a coin into a slit in the barrel they

could have a chance to strike his likeness (Rosenberg, 2011). Otpor also made

extensive use of graffiti, peppering slogans such as “Gotov Je” (“He’s Finished”), and

“Vreme Je” (“It’s Time”) around Belgrade. They were sophisticated in their use of visual

iconography; their logo was a clenched, black fist on a white background (or

alternatively, a white fist on a black background), which was a co-option and reference

to the image of a red fist used by various socialist movements (Cohen, 2000).

Otpor was supported by “extensive financing from the United States”, which they

received through US NGOs and governmental agencies like the National Endowment

for Democracy (NED) and USAID (Cohen, 2000). According to Paul B. McCarthy, an

official in the NED, “from August 1999 the dollars started to flow to Otpor pretty

significantly,” and of the almost $3 million the NED spent in Serbia, “Otpor was certainly

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the largest recipient” (Cohen, 2000). The NED transferred the funds directly into Otpor accounts outside of Serbia. Members of Otpor met with McCarthy in Montenegro and

Hungary. They also met with Madeleine Albright in Berlin. There, Albright told leaders of the group, “We want to see Milosevic out of power, out of Serbia and in The Hague”

(Cohen, 2000). According to William D. Montgomery, the former American Ambassador to Croatia, “Milosevic was high priority for Madeleine Albright” (Cohen, 2000). It is unclear how much the US spent in the effort to oust Milosevic, but USAID estimated $25 million by late 2000; Otpor members also claimed that they received “a lot of covert aid” from the US (Cohen, 2000).

Slobodan Homen, a member of Otpor, admitted that “We had a lot of financial help from Western nongovernmental organizations”. One of these nongovernmental organizations was the International Republican Institute (IRI). Daniel Calingaert of the

IRI claimed that he met Otpor leaders “seven to ten times” in Montenegro Beginning in

October 1999 (Cohen, 2000). From October 1999 to November 2000 the IRI spent $1.8 million in Serbia and Calingaert says that some of that money was “provided direct to

Otpor” (Cohen, 2000).

From March 31 to April 3, 2000, the IRI arranged a seminar at the Budapest

Hilton or twenty Otpor leaders. The seminar was taught by Robert Helvey, a retired US

Army colonel who trained them in the use of non-violence to destabilize governments

(Cohen, 2000). The lessons Helvey imparted to the young Serbians show that the colonel has a keen understanding of netwar and the constraints placed on the use of conventional military force asymmetrically: “There is an enormous price—domestic and international—paid today for using force against a nonviolent movement… [t]he dictator

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still may hold the externalities of power, but he is steadily undermined”, he told them

(Cohen, 2000). Helvey taught the Otpor leaders how to identify key constituencies and demographics that support a regime, such as the police or military, and to subvert the leader's’ power by co-opting or subverting these groups.

After the abdication of Milosevic, some of the Otpor leaders began to export what they had learned to other nations. The two most important of these are Srda Popovic and Slobodan Djinovic. After Milosevic stepped down, Popovic entered politics and won a seat in the Serbian parliament and advised Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic until his assassination in 2003. Djinovic founded Serbia’s first wireless internet service provider and is the leader of the country’s largest private internet and phone company. These two founded a new group in 2003 on a trip to South Africa, the Center for Applied

Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS. The organization teaches the methods of nonviolent struggle to groups from various countries and has been involved with protesters from most, if not all, of the nations which experienced so-called “color revolutions”. Djinovic himself traveled extensively throughout Eastern Europe. He went to Georgia Georgia in 2002 and founded Kmara!! (“Enough”) and hosted Georgia students in Serbia. These students participated in the Rose Revolution that ousted

Eduard Shevardnadze. He also spent months advising Pora (“It’s Time”) in Ukraine, in the lead up to the Orange Revolution. Popovic, Djindjinc and the other alumni of Otpor have been called “modern mercenaries” (Beissinger, 2006, p. 20)

While Otpor and similar student-led opposition groups in other Eastern European nations were mostly portrayed in American media as spontaneously generated, indigenous movements that simply sprang forth suddenly from disgruntled groups of

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disaffected and angry Balkan and Eurasian youth, the truth is much different. Groups like Otpor in Serbia, Kmara in Georgia, and Pora in Ukraine are the offspring of extensive American and Western European political cultivation in the Balkans and

Eastern Europe, dating back to the 1980s, when the NED “began handing out generous doses of dollars in every corner Yugoslavia” (Engdahl, 2004, p. 239). In the early 1990s

“USAID provided $175 million in media assistance to Eastern Europe and the former

Soviet states during the 1990s, which included the training of over 10,000 media professionals” (Sussman, 2010, p. 140).

What the Black/Bulldozer Revolution in Serbia which ousted Milosevic and the other “Color Revolutions” which erupted subsequently, quite apart from being native- born uprisings of the popular will, are the results of what Sussman (2010) calls a

“revolution template”, the US strategy of “packaging, exporting, and spreading democratic revolution like a module across a broad array of settings, irrespective of local circumstances” (Beissinger, 2006, p. 21). This template makes use of modern tactics of electioneering like focus groups and exit polls, psychological manipulation, branding, and the use of slogans in order to create “short-term, euphoric political upheaval” that makes those who participate feel empowered while power is shifted from one group of elites to another (Sussman, 2004, p. 140). In this process of exporting commodified “democratization”—in reality, regime-change—, nonviolent revolution of the kind taught to Otpor by Colonel Helvey, is merely a cost-effective, non-militarist option for removing leaders who threaten to disrupt the plans of American interests for the region or who have fallen out of favor with Washington. Similarly, the concept of

“democracy” is reduced to the election process, which is useful for national elites and

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American interests because it lends a sort of capital, in the form of legitimacy, to any new regime.

In the “Color Revolutions”, student-led opposition groups like Otpor function as

“political technology” for opposition elites, tools that can be “mobiliz[ed] rapidly for street protests or the hostile takeover of official buildings or other state property” (Sussman,

2010, p. 168). These highly mobile groups of youth are used tactically as political weapons, against an incumbent regime. These are the “smart mobs” which USAID and

Creative Associates hoped to generate and control through Zunzuneo and the infiltration of the Cuban hip-hop scene. Youth and youth culture are explicit targets of the democracy-promotion NGOs, as was evident in Eastern and in Cuba. The EXIT

Festival that began to support Cuba’s Rotilla Festival has strong links to Otpor20 and its co-founders (Eror, 2017).

Nonviolence, social media, and popular culture are now more tools in the

“democracy-promotion toolbox” of agencies like USAID, along with others such as

“training for lawyers, journalists, political party leaders, and trade unionists; direct financial aid for civil society organizations; and exchanges and scholarships for students” (Adesnik & McFaul, 2006, p. 7). In a March 2005 Freedom House report directed by Adrian Karatnycky, a senior scholar at Freedom House, and Peter

Ackerman, chair of its board of trustees, the authors argue that support for “people power” in the form of civic resistance groups is one of the most effective “mechanisms by which democracy replaces tyranny” (p. 4). They urge that Western democracy- promoting civil society organizations need to “implement a paradigm shift in [their] priorities in order to promote and strengthen” movements like Otpor and other “civic

20 https://exitfest.org/2/20%20years%20of%20EXIT%20activism.pdf 187

groups as a means of ensuring that there is civic pressure on the new authorities to continue down the path of liberalization and reform” (p. 10).The authors view such support as not only a good in itself but as “investments in civic life” which have the benefit of being “minimal—a matter of millions of dollars or less,” and which are, “far less expensive than major military expenditures and far less costly than the normal bill for large development programs” (p. 10). In other words, cultivating pro-

American/Wester student groups and directly funding cultural events and opposition media outlets is a more cost-effective means of regime change.

Although Ackerman and Karatnycky argue that nonviolent protests and civic groups are the best way to ensure peaceful transitions to democracy, they and their revolution-exporting colleagues overlook evidence that “the outcomes of revolutionary upsurges are highly unpredictable and just as often lead to failure and prolonged civil war as to democratic success,” and that, “one of the unintended consequences of the attempt to export democratic revolution could be the inadvertent stimulation of repression, ethnic conflict, and even civil war,” such as the violent military response of the Uzbek government following the 2005 protest in Andijan and the military coup that followed the 2011 Tahrir Square protests in Egypt (Beissinger, 2006, p. 21). In fact, the

Uzbek protests worked against US geostrategic interests in the Central Asian region when the president of the country, Islam Karimov, expelled the US military following the

Andijan massacre (Walsh, 2005).

As in many other cases, the US supported Karimov despite awareness of his regime’s brutality, which is another point that Ackerman and the revolution exporters elide; many of the nations which are targets for Western democracy-promotion

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operations are governed by repressive regimes that were supported by the West. In the case of Karimov, the US paid his government $15 million to maintain bases in the country after 9/11. According to Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to

Uzbekistan who was fired for criticizing Western support for Karimov, other than the payments for the bases there had been “no significant investment from the west for a while,” and Russian and Chinese state-owned companies have stepped in to fill the void

(Walsh, 2005).

Former Otpor members and CANVAS were also involved in what would become probably the most publicized and vaunted incident of popular uprisings; the so-called

Arab Spring, that swept through North Africa and the Near East.

Soft Power and “Digital Democracy”

CANVAS not only exported their techniques to nascent youth movements in other nations, they licensed their intellectual property as well. Otpor’s signature clinched was used by youth opposition groups in Eastern Europe and Central Asian and the logo showed up in the Egyptian protests against President Mohamed Morsi, used by a group called the April 6 Movement (Joksic & Spoerri, 2011). One of the leaders of that movement, Mohammed Adel, had gone to Belgrade, Serbia in the summer of 2009 to train with CANVAS after the failure of an organized demonstration (Rosenberg, 2011).

The April 6 Movement also received training and funding from an organization linked directly to the US State department, the Alliance of Youth Movements.

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The formation of the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) was supervised by

Jared Cohen, a former US State Department employee and current CEO of Jigsaw

(formerly Google Ideas) (Bratich, 2011). On December 3-5, 2008 the AYM inaugural summit was held at Times Square in New York (Shapiro, 2009). The summit21 was

funded by Facebook, Access 360 Media, Google, YouTube, MTV, Howcast, Columbia

Law School and the U.S. Department of State and leaders from 17 organizations from

15 countries were invited. Among the invitees were Save Darfur Coalition, Genocide

Intervention Network, Burma Global Action Network, an unnamed Cuban group that

was supposed to participate remotely, and Invisible Children. The Youth leaders were

assembled in part to work to create a manual for youth empowerment (U.S. Department

of State, 2008). Howcast planned to use the field manual developed at the Summit as

the foundation of an online hub where emerging youth organizations could access and

share tutorials and tips on how to use social-networking and other technologies to

“promote freedom and justice and counter violence, extremism and oppression”. The

hub — (http://howcast.com/youthmovements) — which is no longer active, would

include instructional videos about organizing social movements online, with titles like,

“How to Use Twitter to Effect Social Change”, and, “How to Protest Without Violence”

(Howcast, 2009 & Howcast, 2009). Howcast, which was started by former Google and

YouTube employees, is a company that hosts a website that posts instructional “how-to”

videos that teach viewers how to perform various tasks or gain skills (Creswell, 2009).

The Alliance of Youth Movements was an expression of a new trend in foreign

policy thinking within the US State Department. Ritter (n.d.) explains that a shift

occurred during the latter half of the Bush administration when officials noticed the

21 https://photos.state.gov/libraries/unesco/231771/pdfs/Alliance_of_Youth_Movements_Summit.pdf 190

pitfalls of military interventions. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wanted to focus on

“smart power” and “digital democracy policies” with the goal of “harness[ing] the potential of Muslim youth to effect political change in their respective countries through the allure of American Culture and values as communicated via tools of social media”.

During the Obama administration Secretary of State Clinton continued the focus on

“digital diplomacy” and the ideas of Jared Cohen, the former Google employee who would go on to lead the formation of AYM, were particularly influential at this time.

During the Iranian “Green Revolution”, Cohen convinced the leadership of Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance for the service so that protesters in Iran could continue to post information.

KONY 2012 and the Otpor Template

The effectiveness of this digitally diplomatic soft power should not be overstated.

It is obvious that the “Green Revolution” was not successful in inciting a revolution against the Iranian government, and the protest movement in Egypt resulted in the

Egyptian military staging a coup d’état. Plainly, the soft power method of engineering regime change has not been able to affect the foreign policy directives of the United

States with complete reliability. Indeed, the possibilities of failure and unpredictable change were openly admitted at a special briefing to announce the AYM initiative. When asked about the wisdom of supporting opposition movements, peaceful or otherwise, in countries that are allies of the US or that the US supports financially, then

Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs James Glassman

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reaffirmed the American commitment to supporting “pro-democracy” groups whether or

not such support places the US at odds with foreign governments. However, the point

should not be missed that this is an explicit aspect of US foreign policy. This much was

realized by Mubarak before the coup, as he raided the offices of foreign NGOs in Egypt,

accusing them of supporting the opposition and subverting his government.

The participation of Invisible Children in the AYM summit is significant. The

organizations and youth leaders gathered at the summit worked with the State

Department and leaders of tech firms to share knowledge of tactics of nonviolent

struggle and online opposition movement organization. By the time of the summit, the

State Department had been involved in supporting and promoting this kind of bottom-up agitation for at least a decade, going back to the involvement of the NED in Serbia, supporting the Otpor movement. The NED, which receives a portion of its funding from the US Department of State through USAID and is subject to congressional oversight, is listed as a partner of Movements.org, which is the new name for the Alliance of Youth

Movements. By the time of the summit, the State Department would already have a reservoir of techniques and tactics, such as the use of logos and branding, and the transformation of public spaces through the use of posters, graffiti, stickers, and spontaneous events. These were all techniques that Otpor used in Serbia, and subsequently exported to other countries like Ukraine, Georgia, and Egypt.

Invisible Children, as a participant in the summit would have made important personal contacts, and would have been able to benefit from the knowledge that was later to be compiled in the online “field manual”. The KONY 2012 campaign and video bear all the hallmarks of an Otpor-type operation. The campaign was highly stylized and

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used distinctive branding that co-opted and re-appropriated iconography and aesthetics from revolutionary left movements. The campaign even had its own version of the Otpor fist; two raised fingers, forming a “V”, on an arm raised in the air, which appeared on campaign promotional materials and posters. Whereas Otpor used “Gotov Je” (He’s finished), Invisible Children used the phrase “Make Him [Kony] Famous” on posters bearing Joseph Kony’s likeness.

Invisible Children’s “Cover the Night” event was to be a miniature version of

Otpor’s widespread use of posters and stickers bearing the visage of Milosevic, along with catchy slogans critical of his regime. Cover the night, which was a worldwide event planned to happen on April 20, 2012, aimed to “plaster ‘every city, on every block’ around the world with posters, stickers and murals of Kony to pressure governments into hunting down [Kony]” (Carroll, 2012). Cover the Night, while it failed to achieve its immediate goals, was an event identical in form to Otpor’s tactics of using posters and stickers to convert public spaces into politicized spaces in furtherance of political aims.

Wittingly or unwittingly, Invisible Children were partners with individuals with ties to the highest levels of American government. Invisible Children’s main partners are two other NGOs that focus on the central African region; Resolve Uganda and the Enough

Project. Resolve Uganda produces the “LRA crisis tracker” which publishes updates of

LRA activity, presumably so that civilians can avoid the group. The Enough Project is an

NGO that works to stop atrocities in several different central African nations, particularly

Congo, South Sudan, and Uganda. The Enough Project was founded in 2007 by John

Prendergast and Gayle Smith. John Prendergast is a former director for African Affairs at the US National Security Council and Gayle Smith is a former Senior Director of

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African Affairs at the National Security Council. Smith was appointed as head of USAID

in 2015 by President Obama.

Prendergast has been involved in many charities and NGOs dealing with various

issues pertaining to peace and development in Africa, such as Not on Our Watch, the

Satellite Sentinel Project, the Save Darfur Coalition, the Darfur Dream Team Sister

Schools program, and the Raise Hope for Congo program. He has also written a

number of books, such as Not on Our Watch, co-authored with actor Don Cheadle, and

The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa's Worst Human Rights Crimes, both

published in 2007. Prendergast has worked extensively with celebrities and cultural

figures to draw attention to African issues such as Darfur and “conflict minerals” from

Congo.

Prendergast’s charitable activities have drawn criticism, especially because of

what some see as a well-meaning but very naive and limited understanding of complex

issues in Africa. A Ugandan scholar, Mahmood Mamdani, has leveled harsh criticism at

the work of Prendergast and one of the NGOs with which he is involved, the Save

Darfur Coalition. A debate between Mamdani and Prendergast was held at the

Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs on April 14, 2009,

presented by the university’s Institute for African Studies (Columbia, 2009). During the debate, which was commented on by Kircher-Allen (2011), Mamdani argued that Save

Darfur and Prendergast had “turned the world into an advertising medium” and that the

Save Darfur Coalition “has not created or even tried to create an informed movement, but a feel-good constituency”. Mamdani also made an interesting comparison between the methods of Save Darfur and the African warlords and rebel groups they claim to

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combat: “[Save Darfur’s] focus is increasingly shifting from college students to high

school kids. These are Save Darfur’s version of child soldiers” (Kircher-Allen, 2011).

These statements may not be an exaggeration considering the tenacity with which Save Darfur lobbied the Obama administration to resolve the crisis in Darfur. The organization strongly criticized President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force General Scott Gration. In a letter to the president, the Save Darfur

Coalition said that the Obama should order Sudan to implement a 2005 peace deal that ended Sudan’s civil war and to also remove President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and that, if the government in Khartoum would not comply, that “targeted military action” should be used (Charbonneu, 2009).

Mamdani’s objections to the work of the NGO Save Darfur and the Enough

Project co-founder Prendergast could also stand as an analysis and critique of the methods of democracy-promotion by means of “digital diplomacy”. The export of Otpor- style, branded “revolutions” that eschew discussions of issues in favor of focus on image really is the transformation of the complicated world of geopolitics and political power struggles into an “advertising medium” united by short-term, euphoric, explosions of passions masquerading as true, democratic participation in the governance of a society. And the explicit policy of targeting youth to do the work of destabilizing foreign governments or of pressuring US legislators to intervene —militarily if need be— in the affairs of foreign nations, while less brutal than forcing them to kill or rape enemies, is not any more respectful of their intelligence or human worth outside of being political tools for the powerful.

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Conclusion

The argument of this chapter is that the “third sector” of (I)NGOs, private foundations, think tanks, and development agencies form a system of governance in the form of a distributed network. This network exists alongside the apparatus of the state as traditionally conceived, but is not “the government” per se. Its locus of power is occult and integrated within the society. The examples from this chapter—Zunzuneo,

Piramideo, Otpor, and the use of culture as a means of effecting American foreign policy—demonstrate that propaganda can be understood as a technology of governance; in other words, it is a means of managing individuals, groups, and political forces to achieve political objectives and to maintain a political status quo.

With this understanding we can view KONY 2012 as an instance of the diffused network of governance aiming its power on the American population itself. KONY 2012 was not the first time this happened; the Save Darfur Coalition’s activities are a different, but related, example of elements of the third sector governance network propagandizing the American public in order to achieve the goal of American intercession into the affairs of Sudan. However, KONY 2012, as the biggest viral internet event at the time, was possibly the most successful attempt at influencing the

American public in this way.

An explanation for why such propagandizing is necessary is that the interventions Invisible Children, and their government-linked partners the Enough

Project, wanted the US government to make lacked legitimacy. By 2012 the United

States had been involved in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for almost a

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decade, and the American public had grown past war-weariness. Given the goal of the campaign (i.e., to “Get Kony”) would require military involvement in an area of the world most Americans would not view as immediately impinging upon national security interests, legislators and policy makers would also be hesitant to lend support to such an operation. In this case, legitimacy would be a type of political capital that needed to be won in order to perform the political work of entering into another foreign military adventure. KONY 2012 and its propaganda, aiming to create masses of youth and anger against Joseph Kony by “making him famous”, would be able to generate the needed legitimacy by engineering an Otpor-style pressure movement that would force legislators to assent to involvement. Jason Russell says precisely this in the KONY

2012 video:

For Kony to be arrested this year, the Ugandan military has to find him. In

order to find him, they need the technology and training to track him in the

vast jungle. That’s where the American advisors come in. But in order for

the American advisors to be there, the US government has to deploy

them. They’ve done that, but if the government doesn’t believe the people

care about arresting Kony, the mission will be canceled. In order for the

people to care, they have to know, and they will only know if Kony’s name

is everywhere. (Invisible Children, 2012)

The recent scandal following news of the deaths of four American soldiers in the

African country of Niger supports such an interpretation (Timm, 2017). Most Americans

were probably unaware of their nation’s military involvement in the country, and news of

the deaths of American soldiers there have caused problems for the current

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administration, although US soldiers have been in Niger since the Obama administration.

Invisible Children’s partnership with the Enough Project and its participation in the Alliance of Youth Movements demonstrate direct connections to the State

Department and suggest that Invisible Children would have had access to nonviolent

“democracy promotion” techniques used the NED, NDI, IRI, Otpor, and CANVAS. A comparison of the tactics of the KONY 2012 campaign and Otpor’s anti-Milosevic activity shows many similarities and the former seems to be highly influenced by the push for “digital democracy” and “people power” that was a focus of the State

Department at the time, the difference being that KONY 2012 was an application of digital democracy domestically. Or, given the centrality of military intervention to

Invisible Children’s plans to “get Kony”, it was an instance of the waging of netwar against the American people; a protracted campaign that used propaganda to change the perception of events.

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CONCLUSION: PROPAGANDA IN A POST-SOCIAL MEDIA AGE

This essay has sought to elaborate a new definition of propaganda as a

rhetorical activity and a technology of governance by using the massive viral internet

video KONY 2012 as an example. First, neutral understanding of propaganda was

advanced, which allows for the understanding of how propaganda functions, without

value judgements. Next, John Dewey’s response to Walter Lippmann’s lack of faith in

democracy was discussed and the use of partitioning populations to facilitate subject

formation was explored. The third chapter examined Stuart Hall’s system of en-coding

and decoding texts and augmented it with a multi-dimensional model and some understandings of the dynamic nature of society from the Russian semiotician Yuri

Lotman.

The fourth chapter examined the KONY 2012 video as an example of

“militainment”, military-themed entertainment that has been sanitized of references to actual violence and that serves to promote an acceptance of militarism. The fifth chapter examined how the KONY 2012 video was informed by concepts and techniques of governance emanating from the United States Department of State during the time of its release and how the Kony phenomenon is related to similar “manufactured” popular movements in other parts of the world. What follows is a speculation on the future of propaganda in a post-Web 2.0 age and what forms propaganda might take in such an environment.

Participatory Networks and Propaganda

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In the age of participatory online media and social networking technologies a much subtler understanding of propaganda and free communication is needed.

Technology enthusiasts who see great promise in the liberatory potential of the networked world argue that new collaborative online technologies have circumvented the old power structures of centralized media and journalism, ushering in an age of participatory culture in which there are no boundaries between producers and users

(Jenkins, 2006; Benkler, 2007; Bruns, 2008). For such researchers, propaganda, control of information, and disinformation can be overcome with popular technologies like

Google, Facebook, and YouTube which are collaborative, free, and open. Such an idea is quite naïve. There is ample evidence to show that, not only are these new technologies not as free and open as they seem, but they can also be used as more effective vehicles of propaganda and governance.

An example of how even user-made content is affected by traditional hierarchies is the recent, so-called YouTube “Adpocalypse”. YouTube, which is owned by Google, is funded—like traditional media—by advertiser revenue in part drawn from a revenue sharing scheme in which YouTube splits the proceeds from ads shown during a video with that video’s creator (a similar system exists for websites not owned by Google through its AdSense program). YouTube takes forty-five percent of the funds and the content creator keeps the remaining fifty-five percent (Rosenberg, n.d.). On March 17,

2017 the Times of London published an article titled; “YouTube Hate Preachers Share

Screens with Household Names”. In the article, the Times revealed that ads for private companies such as L'Oréal, Sainsbury’s, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, and Disney were

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running on YouTube alongside videos posted by the likes of the former Ku Klux Klan

Imperial Wizard David Duke and Wagdi Ghoneim, and Egyptian-Qatari extremist

Islamist preacher who allegedly praised Osama bin-Laden (Mostrous, 2017).

This news caused several high-profile companies to pull their ads from YouTube.

Soon after the publication of the Times article, on March 21st, Google Chief Business

Officer Philipp Schindler published a blog post in which he stated that Google intended

to “tighten safeguards” to ensure that ads only appeared with the content produced by

approved creators (Schindler, 2017). A Business Insider article revealed that more than

250 prestigious companies had pulled their advertising from YouTube and estimated

that the site would lose around $750 million in ad revenue (Rath, 2017).

The loss in revenue did not affect only Google, many content creators saw precipitous declines in their incomes. Many creators who believed they had posted innocuous videos suddenly realized that some of their most popular content had been removed from the site. This threatened the livelihoods of creators who had built businesses on the YouTube platform and used it as their primary source of income

(Hess, 2017; Alba 2017). The resulting impact to independent content creators was dubbed the “Adpocalypse”. The situation has become so bad that many creators that used YouTube as their main income stream have resorted to using Patreon, a service that allows fans to make small monthly donations to online content creators of their choice.

One explanation for the adpocalypse is that the placement of ads is controlled by an algorithm that screens out material that may be sensitive or offensive. This method known as programmatic advertising and uses data gathered from user search patterns

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to target ads based on an individual’s preferences; therefore, a neo-Nazi who is looking for hate videos might see an ad for Toyota if he shopped online for a car recently. But the algorithm cannot perfectly distinguish between the subtleties of videos containing political satire or sexual jokes and those that may promote violence or be pornographic in nature, so with YouTube’s stricter policies the creators who are most affected are innocent. One creator lamented, “It’s getting so bad that you can’t even speak your mind or be honest without fear of losing money and being not ‘brand-friendly’” (Hess,

2017).

Two important points from this case that counter the argument that sites like

YouTube are creating a new collaborative culture and economy are immediately apparent. First, YouTube in its funding structure and operations is no different from traditional media companies. YouTube is only superficially “free”—in both the senses of

“unfettered” and “gratis”—and makes profits by selling audiences to advertisers

(Smythe, 1977). The second point is connected to the first. Not only is YouTube identical to traditional media companies in terms of its profit-making strategy, its profit- generating is more intensive. The adpocalypse happened as a result of programmatic advertising. In order to target ads specific to each individuals’ habits and interests,

YouTube, through its parent company Google, has to collect an enormous amount of data on each person who uses its site. This amounts to surveillance on a massive scale of the hundreds of millions of people who visit websites that participate in Google’s

AdSense program. Far from being a bastion of independent media making and collaboration, YouTube effectively is a system of soft censorship, mass surveillance, and marketing.

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However, censorship is a rather crude method and the type of propaganda that this essay has discussed is much more subtle and effective. The propagandistic potential of the internet lies not in brute-force censorship but in the careful guiding of attention and shaping of perceptions and meanings.

An important example of the propagandistic potential of social media is a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2014. The study was performed by a member of Facebook’s Core Data Science Team and a professor and graduate student from Cornell University’s departments of

Communication and Information Science. The study tested whether emotional contagion, the passing of emotions from one person to another, was possible over online social networks without in-person contact. The study was massive (N=689,003) and all the subjects were randomly selected but not informed. The authors stated that users had consented by agreeing to Facebook’s Data Use Policy when they began using the site. By manipulating the probability of positive or negative posts appearing in the users' news feeds the authors studied whether the emotional content of users’ status updates changed, which would indicate that they were influenced by the emotional content in their news feeds. The study used the presence of emotional words, drawn from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count system (LIWC). The authors found that:

The results show emotional contagion…for people who had positive content

reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status

updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity

was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results suggest that the

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emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own

moods, constituting…the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional

contagion via social networks (Guillory, Hancock, & Kramer, 2014, p. 8789)

The researchers found that the effect was small but meaningful given the many daily experiences that could affect a person’s mood and the massive scale of the study.

Whether or not the use of emotion words is evidence of an actually experienced emotion is another question, but it is obvious that the authors of the study succeeded in at least affecting the behavior of the subjects of the study. If behavior and even emotion can be manipulated by means of online social networks the ability for such technology to amplify the rhetorical power of propaganda is vast.

Bearing in mind that propaganda is not simply about censorship or transmitting falsehoods, but rather is a technology for shaping perceptions and effecting governance, we can view, “participatory media platforms as conduits for governance,” that, “manage a field of communicational processes, practices, and expectations”

(Langlois, 2012, p. 100). One of the ways that communications and expectations are managed online is through algorithms that generate results for search engines or determine what news and posts users see when they log into a website like Facebook.

Google’s PageRank algorithm determines a site’s relevance in part by the number of

“backlinks”—links to the site by other websites, similar to citing an academic article— that connect to it, while Facebook uses a similar count of backlinks and also analyzes the user’s friendship network.

On the internet, even without direct appeals, propaganda works by “enact[ing] dynamics of visibility and invisibility,” by, “mak[ing] information more or less visible

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according to its relevance” (Langlois, 2012, p. 101). Even if the effects are small, as in the emotional contagion study, given the massive numbers of people using the internet and the massive amount of data contained there, there is great potential to manipulate what Lippmann called the “pseudo-environment” of the mind: “the process of governance on participatory media platform is about defining degrees of meaningfulness through the attribution of cultural values, the shaping of cultural perceptions of the platform, and the setting up of a horizon of communicative possibilities and agencies” (Langlois, 2012, p. 103).

Today and in the future, propaganda is and will be much more than what Dewey called “bunkum”. Dewey perhaps underestimated the propagandists, for they were constructing a system of managed, limited democracy which was the rival of Dewey’s own educational-political view of a democratic society. Given the possibilities for governance and control afforded by propaganda it is difficult to think of any effective means education could have for countering it, even if education were redesigned along

Deweyan lines. Perhaps, as Wimberly (2017) ponders, “If propagandists have mobilized public opinion as a means to transform who we are, then there may not be a ‘true’ subject left to liberate; the liberated subject may need to be created first” (p. 108). If this is the case, then perhaps the place of education would be to serve as a type of democratic counter-propaganda, to combat the propaganda of governance and to shape new subjects for a democratic society.

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